Woosh! Flash! Bang! Alkazam! What was all that commotion there now? It was Now You See Me being released on Blu-Ray and DVD! This is a film that everyone is taking about, though from my own research seemingly no one has actually seen. Well, it’s great so go buy it immediately. In short it’s a film about magicians robbing a bank with one of the avengers, two of the guys from Zombieland and two of the guys from the Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy in it. In long however, it is the following.
The film introduces four individuals, known as the Four Horsemen with their own specific kind of magical ability. They are as follows:
J. Daniel Atlas - Played by Jesse Eisenberg, he is a genius close up magician specialising in card tricks and sleight of hand, also considered the leader of the group in public settings. I get the feeling he’s supposed to be really cool and ‘George Clooney in Oceans 11-like’ but he’s so intrinsically not that I can’t tell.
Henley Reeves - The sexy eye-candy/token female character whose magical ability is escapism, though the thing she seems to escape from most often is the predatory clutches of Woody Harrelson’s penis-aura.
Jack Wilder - A sleight of hand illusionist, but primarily a pickpocket, a cheeky Oliver Twist type that has such a lovely innocent puppy-dog face that it makes you more likely to call him a young scallywag than a thieving cunt.
Merritt McKinney - Woody Harrelson playing the character he plays nowadays in films, except this one is also a mentalist, in the more traditional sense of Derren Brown mind molesting. He’s the kind of guy that could tell you what colour your bedroom is, what you’re thinking about, the name of the first girl you kissed. He can even tell you the colour of dress it was that you tried on when your girlfriend was at work that one time. All of this he could tell solely from the way you cleared your throat when he said ‘Aerosmith’.
In essence the plot boils down to this. These 4 are summoned together by some magical and mysterious fifth magician who leaves Tarot cards in their bits and pieces for them to find. They then rob this bank on stage in front of loads of people and everyone shits themselves. They keep stealing money and giving it away, just like Robin Hood and his 3 mates who were also at the same time Robin Hood. They were like 4 Robin Hoods is what I’m saying. But then the plot develops in the same vein as The Usual Suspects mixed with Oceans 11 so there’s not a lot I can go on to say about it that wouldn’t utterly destroy it.
Personally I thought this film was fandabulously brilliant. There was a lovely balance between plot and intrigue, some lovely red herrings, white elephants, blue zebras, mauve rattlesnakes and a whole spectrum of chinchillas leading you down the wrong path of who was doing what naughty business and what was really going on. It was so intriguing that having it on and falling asleep while watching it should be a medical test for Narcolepsy that my girlfriend promptly failed. Or passed, I’m not sure which qualifies as her having it.
The grumpy Incredible Hulk/Blonde French Lady sub plot was more functional than interesting and did leave me wishing he would rage out and punch her across the room, but really that’s just me picking at nits. When it cut to a part about the pair of them it was like cutting from a film you were enjoying to a Stella Artois advert that was directed by Michael Bay, all in all though certainly worth a watch and you’ll immediately understand why I couldn’t go into any more detail on the plot. Watch with glee, as the story unfolds beautifully before you like an onion that was actually made from increasing denominations of monetary pieces of paper. I’m imagining fives, tens, twenties then fifties then right in the middle just a big knob of gold. Hahaha I said big knob.
Dave Roberts
Now You See Me at CeX
