(no subject)

[skalja]

Now You See Me was decent enough, but if you've been on the fence about seeing it, be warned it's liable to annoy you if you're even a casual fan of the heist genre. Half the fun of a heist film is trying to figure out what's happening and how it's being done. The glib answer is "Hollywood," natch, but the charm of the effective heist set-up is that it asks you to wilfully suspend your genre savviness and trust in the film's reality just enough to imagine that the same tricks it shows us are, with sufficient expertise and resources, possible in ours. It makes the same pledge with its audience as a magic show -- in exchange for your faith, we will give you an experience you won't forget -- which is why the concept of a heist film in which the con artists are stage magicians is both desperately obvious and inspired. Unfortunately, when one relies on this much flashy cinematography and blatant SFX, it undermines its own entertainment value.

I didn't actually guess the twist at the end, so I guess the misdirection succeeded on that level, but it did so by making me not give a crap about the character involved until by the time of the reveal I had no emotional investment. Meanwhile, I've come to the conclusion that Jesse Eisenberg is a talented actor who consistently plays a particular jerk archetype I have zero interest in following as a lead but whom inevitably ends up as one of the stars anyway. More Isla Fischer and Melanie Laurent, please!

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth. Feel free to comment at your site of preference.