Now You See Me Reviews
Top Critic
Complicated nonsense about four professional magicians caught up in an elaborate revenge plot.
If you're OK with the film playing you for a sap, you'll laugh and clap and wonder how that bird got into that hat. But if you think there's a difference between being tricked and being cheated, you may feel swindled.
This would-be "Ocean's Eleven" of the magic world remains watchable throughout, even as it plods along without ever quite fulfilling its potential.
One of those movies with a terrific premise and a less-than-terrific follow-through.
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| Original Score: C
Boasting a terrific cast and a flimsy plot whose logic disappears faster than a rabbit in a hat, Now struggles to pull off its cinematic sleights of hand.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
The more you see of the movie and the more elaborate the tricks get, the less you are inclined to believe that humans rather than machines are in charge of the illusions.
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| Original Score: 2/4
All too quickly ... the smoke clears and Now You See Me proves to be less than meets the eye.
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| Original Score: 2/4
For all the talent up on the screen - and one can't fault the performances - the movie just doesn't deliver.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Ultimately "Now You See Me" promises more than it delivers, though its cast is always fun to watch and the pace never lags. It has the magic for a while ... and then it disappears.
Full Review
| Original Score: B-
Much of what makes "Now You See Me" so entertaining - in a gaudy, disposable, Vegas act sort of way - is its ever-escalating ridiculousness.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
The outrageous setup more than suffices, and the film gets a lift from offbeat characters.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
This is one of those mystery thrillers that are supposed to culminate in a big shocker ending, though the script piles up so many implausibilities that by the time the ending arrives, nothing is surprising anymore.
With Now You See Me, director Louis Leterrier has taken a page out of the book of his characters: use sleight-of-hand so viewers are distracted from some rather obvious screenplay deficiencies.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Director Louis Leterrier has the energy but not the visual grace to match the elegant malefactions of his characters.
Exudes self-importance and can't help but make promises it can't deliver on.
Now You See Me is a superficially diverting but substance-free concoction, a would-be thriller as evanescent as a magic trick and one that develops no suspense or rooting interest because the characters possess all the substance of invisible ink.
The movie may think it's pulling a rabbit out of a hat. But it's more like a turkey.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
The scatterbrained story loses its thread and becomes a dull, frenetic chase movie ...
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| Original Score: 2/5
It takes a certain dark magic to make the talent of a top cast disappear right before your eyes. Now You See Me does just that.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
When functioning like a magic trick, this breathlessly entertaining picture delights in its showmanship, but the more entertaining the trickery, the tougher the explanation, and when the truth is revealed the answer can't help but fail to satisfy.
Perhaps the requisite summer-film explosion scene is just classic misdirection, per every magician's handbook. Look over here, and maybe you won't notice this movie doesn't make any sense!
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
The actors, including Morgan Freeman as an anti-showman devoted to revealing the magicians' secrets, look like they're having so much fun that you can forgive the periodic arbitrariness of it all.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
The movie wants to be Ocean's Eleven with top hats and wands, but the rapport between Now You See Me's principals doesn't come close to approximating Clooney and company's (or Sinatra and company's) cool.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
You want famous faces? Flirtations? Heists, thrills, car chases, explosions, disappearing bunny rabbits? All here, and all designed to distract us from the emptiness at the show's core.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
"Now You See Me" is a movie about magic, but its most astonishing trick is how little mileage it gets out of a stellar cast.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
The whole of it is made of flash paper, intended to burn brightly for an instant before vanishing from your memory without a trace.
"Now You See Me," despite some compelling moments, is one of those movies you watch while thinking about other movies that you're not watching.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
