So many directors these days seem to want to be Christopher Nolan: There's Zack Snyder aiming for "Dark Knight" portentousness with "Man of Steel" and Danny Boyle aping the false-reality trickiness of "Inception" with "Trance" to name but two. The latest wannabe is French director-gone-Hollywood Louis Leterrier ("Clash of the Titans") with "Now You See Me," which aims to be a Vegas-magician version of "The Prestige."
Like most things Vegas, it's all flash and precious little substance, despite a decent cast who try their best. Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Isla Fisher and Dave Franco play a supergroup of magicians known as The Four Horsemen, assembled by a mysterious fifth figure for unknown purposes. J. Daniel Atlas (Eisenberg) is an egomaniac prestidigitator, Merritt McKinney (Harrelson) a cynical "mentalist" who specializes in hypnosis, while Jack Wilder (Franco) is a fleet-fingered pickpocket — and since when did that classify as "magic"? — and Henley Reeves (Fisher) is an escape artist who specializes in rattling the cage of her former boyfriend Atlas. The sponsor of their elaborate Vegas production is a billionaire played by Michael Caine, while Morgan Freeman shows up as a relentless magic debunker; both actors were in all three of Nolan's Batman movies.
The Four Horsemen's stage show involves teleporting a member of the audience into a bank vault in Paris, and then bringing him back while showering a rain of purloined money onto the show's audience; it turns out that the money was in fact stolen, but how? The FBI, led by a shambling Mark Ruffalo doing his best Peter Falk/Columbo imitation, get on the trail of the Horsemen, assisted by Melanie Laurent's far more capable Interpol agent, and it doesn't take a mentalist to predict that their initial head-butting will eventually lead to romance.