Friday, October 11, 2013

Just Bad (Spoilers for Now You See Me)

A few days ago I saw the movie Now You See Me. I had high hopes. The trailer looked amazing and what I heard from friends was great but when I actually saw it myself I was blown away by how bad it actually was. It follows the story of four magicians that come together to steal from the rich and give to the poor as sort of magical Robin Hoods. They use what seems to be teleportation to rob a bank and give the money to their audience. It sounds awesome so far, I know.
They then go to a FBI agent (Mark Ruffalo) who is supposed to be smart enough to be leading investigations for the FBI but he seems to have maybe the IQ of a third grader. He even gets in a chase scene where he gets the magicians tracker placed in his pocket and chases him the whole time not realizing he would be right in front of him or on his back and then once he hits a dead end all of his men run up to him. They hold guns up to him as if they have never seen this man (Ruffalo) that is supposed to be their boss and what convinces them that he isn't the magician (that they also seem to not know what he looks like) is when he pulls the tracker out of his pocket and says the brilliant line "AHHHH!! I was tracking myself!" Great work from the FBI's best.
One of the biggest problems of this movie is the complete lack of story development. The whole thing feels like I got a text from my friend and they are trying to explain to me what happened without wasting too many characters. The Eye, which is the group they are trying to get into and is the whole purpose for everything they do in the movie, is only talked about for maybe two minutes. They explain nearly nothing about it, yet it is the key plot point. Also the main love story between the FBI agent and the Interpol agent is given nearly no time so that when they kiss at the end nobody cares because it was developed none. And it was somehow important enough to be the last scene to the whole movie.
The biggest problem with this movie is the "twist". It turns out that the FBI agent was the one behind their tricks the whole time and he is actually in the Eye. This makes the entire movie worthless. It makes you feel like you are wasting your time because he was chasing them the whole movie. The worst part is there is no foreshadowing what so ever to this twist. It just happens. In order to have a good twist you have to leave hints so that your viewer can potentially guess it before the end or you haven't really fooled them. You've just pulled a twist out of no where and said "Ha! Look we fooled you!" Half the fun of a twist is rewatching the movie and seeing all the clues. This had none of that.
I would suggest not wasting your time on this movie. You will leave mad and feeling like you wasted two hours of your life. This movie should be called Now You See Me Wasting My Time.
It had no character development, no story development, cheesy dialogue, but it did have a lot of cool flashes and an explosion or two so maybe somebody will like it.

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