NOW YOU SEE ME

year: 2013 cast: Mark Ruffalo, Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Isla Fisher, Michael Caine rating: ***

Perhaps NOW YOU DON’T, the second half of the famous line NOW YOU SEE ME, would be a more fitting title… After we get to know “The Four Horseman,” a group of magician/con artists using their showcase to steal from the rich and give to the poor (think David Copperfield meets Robin Hood), we don’t see them very much or get to know them all too well. 

That’s not entirely bad since Mark Ruffalo’s put-upon FBI agent Dylan Rhodes… constantly on the trail of the roving charlatans, each a solo act until they were hired by a mysterious backer to pull off three big heist/shows as a team… is a worthy main character: Through his befuddled eyes we venture from one level onto the next.

The Horseman include Jesse Eisenberg as a snarky card shark; Isla Fisher as a risk taking performance artist; Dave Franco as the group’s physically-charged street fighting freshman trying to prove his worth; and scene stealer Woody Harrelson as a charming comic relief mentalist creeping into everyone’s minds. Woody’s Merritt McKinney is, by far, the coolest cog in the wheel. But once each score is done we’re left with duped agent Rhodes lost in a perpetual cat and mouse maze.

Along with an exposition-spouting Morgan Freeman, whose act is to debunk all magicians, you’ll be guessing through each step: although the actual stage shows are downright preposterous unless you put this movie in the Science Fiction category. And to bring the cerebral mind games down to earth there’s a prolonged fistfight and car chase leading to a giant twist ending too complicated for its own good, over-explaining the ultimate ruse and making everything (and everyone) seem simplistically sleight of hand in comparison.