The willing suspension of disbelief is often essential to enjoy movies, particularly movies pertaining to a certain variety.
Yet, every so often, filmmakers overestimate the audience’s capacity to suspend disbelief, and more egregiously, they underestimate their audience’s intelligence.
And when both happen in conjunction, as it did during the closing moments of Now You See Me, it leads to a truly frustrating and frankly infuriating experience.
Now You See Me is a movie about magicians performing heists. It’s a heightened world, a fanciful story. But we as the audience buy into that world. Because? Suspension of disbelief.
The film offers us characters that can seemingly perform actual magic. All right, I’m willing to suspend disbelief.
The film speaks of an ancient order of magicians who have access to real magic. All right, I’m willing to suspend disbelief.
HERE BE SPOILERS
One of the principal plotlines concerns FBI agent Dylan Rhodes’ pursuit of the Four Horsemen. He is shown being a driven individual with a sense of justice.
The film shows him, at multiple times, being by himself and working to capture the Horsemen.
And then, at the very end, perhaps because the filmmakers felt a movie of this nature simply had to have a grand twist, they reveal Rhodes to be the puppet master who was pulling all the strings. He was the mastermind.
What? No, really. What?
I don’t particular enjoy being overly critical of films and filmmakers, but I will make an exception here.
This ‘twist’ is one of the most ridiculous plot developments I have ever seen. In any movie, ever. It is above all things, stupid.
Not only is it painfully forced and unbelievably convoluted, it simply doesn’t make any sense whatsoever in the context of events presented in the film.
A good twist is one where seeds are sown in deliberately but out of the audience’s reach. So that once the reveal arrives, we can trace it back and make sense of it.
In Now You See Me, that is impossible to do. Because it was a patently ridiculous twist.
Goodness, they showed him alone, without anyone around him, working on his plan to bring down the Horsemen! It is absurd.
And above all else, it belittles its audience for the sake of a cheap and unearned reveal.
Without its ludicrous ending, Now You See Me could have been a fairly fun and forgettable outing. But because of that asinine ending, it becomes something far worse – stupid.
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