Now You See Me

Recommendation

I have seen Now You See Me many times and still haven’t gotten bored of it. At a base level, it is a fun crime movie with lots of twists and turns. Layered on top of that, the filmmakers put a lot of effort into making the magic tricks they depict realistic. Even if you ignore the plot, there is all the entertainment of a regular magic show.

I would definitely recommend this movie if you are a fan of the crime or mystery genres. The characters are punchy and the plot keeps you guessing. I will say the movie takes a step down in my estimation after the first watch because the twists are what make the movie most engaging, but that shouldn’t stop you from checking it out at least once.

I marked this as a favorite because I keep coming back to it. When I first saw it I think it influenced me to start learning magic at an embarrassingly old age (already in college) just because of that opening scene. The magic in the movie alone is enough to get a recommendation out of me, but I’m also a sucker for mystery/crime films.

Thoughts

Spoilers ahead…

Feasibility of Tricks

One thing I paid closer attention to on my most recent rewatch was how many of the tricks are “possible” and how much of it is made up. Apart from the Mentalism stuff, I think most of the tricks in the movie are actually more possible than I initially imagined.

The opening sequence of the film shows a trick directed at the audience, which is a great way to both introduce the film’s gimmick while at the same time drawing in the viewers. I know how the trick works, and it’s harder to pull off when you don’t have specific camera angles, but needless to say it is something you can do in real life.

I had written off the scene where the horsemen are first gathered in the apartment and Henley puts a rose in a pitcher as CGI, but I think that trick is possible too. It is done with CGI in the film, but I think this could be achieved with a similar mechanism as a Pythagorean Cup if one were to attempt this in real life.

The whole point of Thaddeus Bradley’s character is to explain how some of the tricks work after the fact, which proves the plausibility of those tricks explicitly. However, there’s an added layer to the movie in that even the tricks that are not explicitly explained are still possible from what I can tell.

I think it would be fair to guess that everything, aside from the Mentalism, could actually be pulled off by sufficiently talented and prepared magicians in real life. It is sort of a fun exercise to try to work out the tricks that the movie leaves unexplained.

Impractical Heists

My only major issue with the film’s execution is that I don’t think the heists would have any lasting impact. Each heist has a specific person or entity that it is targeting, but I have some doubts about if the goal of hurting each of them would be achieved in the long run.

In the first heist, all of the money is shot into the theater which would’ve been difficult to track down afterwards since it’s unlikely the police would’ve been called in immediately for what appears to be a magic act. Even so, it seems unlikely that nothing would’ve been recovered by the police.

Admittedly, the first heist is the most likely to have worked long term, but there would’ve been enough evidence linking them to the actual crime to at least hold them under suspicion. That would’ve put a halt to the remaining heists if nothing else.

The second heist is by far the one that would be the easiest to undo. Unless the horsemen did something serious to cover their paper trail, the banks would have a pretty easy job of tracking down the transfers and undoing them. Even if we give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they did bounce the money between 15 bank accounts before each final transfer, people have their accounts hacked all the time and there are safeguards in place to prevent exactly what happened in the second heist.

In all likelihood the bank would’ve frozen the account after the first or second massive transfer. The transfers also would likely be put on hold just out of protocol and would not have cleared immediately.

The third heist seems straightforward enough, but the point of it was to frame Thaddeus Bradley. To do this, they fill his car with all the money they’ve stolen, but it’s so stuffed-full that it is literally exploding out of all the windows and doors. It’s done in such a ridiculous way that it’s clear he couldn’t actually be responsible. There’d be no possible way of escaping from the scene of the crime with his car in that condition.

In summation, they would’ve been stopped in their tracks after the first heist. If they magically did get out of jail after the first heist, the second heist would’ve been reversed or impossible even with the security questions. Finally, they wouldn’t have succeeded in framing Thaddeus in the way they went about it. At the end of the day only the bank in France is likely to feel the lasting effects of what they did and that’s only if it doesn’t have insurance.