Quote:
Originally Posted by MurderbyNumbers234
Now You See Me was a pretty deese watch, I'd give it a C or B-, def not a D as someone did. (Lets not forget the caliber of movies these days in general)
It was me and I understand your point, but I'm not grading on a curve. If movies suck more today so be it. There's still the occasional good movie out there so I can't really inflate anything. It wasn't
White Chicks bad but I really didn't like that movie at all, sounds like you did.
I like magic movies too,
The Prestige is one of my favorites. Liked
The Illusionist to a lesser extent. To me this was more like a bad heist flick, not a magician movie. And the ending doesn't make a lot of sense because the four magicians were totally unnecessary for the task at hand, and it turns out that was secondary to the complete wackness of the ending anyway. Not to mention the rules of world they were playing in.
For example, there's a scene where the four have these invitation cards they're inexplicably all carrying on them like a year after the meeting they were intended to invite them to, which jump out of their hands and combine to melt into each other and... WTF. I'm pretty sure that was actual magic.
Then there's like a 10 minute section where one character is tediously explaining how a heist was performed--a bad sign that it takes that much explanation for the benefit of the audience--where he springs a minor twist by explaining that
Ha ha! Audience never saw that coming! Fooled you!
The problem with doing this in movies is that they're cheap tricks. When twists depend on some new fact introduced of out thin air it's not satisfying. It would be like a murder mystery where the killer wasn't even in the movie to that point.
It was the butler? Huh? I didn't even know there WAS a butler!
Good movies think these things through, and they earn reveals and twists by misdirection while the clues are in plain sight. That's hard; one one hand you have to give all the information to the audience, on the other you have to keep them from putting the pieces together so you can surprise them later. Or spend a lot of time developing the characters to make them trusted by the audience, then betray it later.
The Sixth Sense was a great example,
The Usual Suspects another.
What
Now You See Me did was just not give the information, it cheated the audience on the clues. I can't even remember a single character's name much less trust any of them.
What they tried to do is give you a bunch of characters so that
LOL this is longer than the review was, but for me this is one of the worst-written movies I've seen this year. Very lazy writing. I've spent more time annoyed by it than I spent watching it though and was just discussing it with someone else. It's such a mess a rant seems more appropriate than a review.