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Now You See Me (2013) has received a lot of mixed reviews but a lot of people seem not to understand this movie – at all.
 
The movie starts off with J. Daniel Atlas doing a card trick in the streets. He asks one of the audience members which card they see when he flips a deck in front of them two times. After he aligns the cards for them to spot back the card they saw, but they can no longer find it. Atlas throws his deck in the sky and shows everyone the ‘missing card’ as lit rooms depict the number 7 on the building.
 
Merritt McKinney is a mentalist from New Orleans and hypnotizes a woman in a restaurant besides her cheating husband. Jack Wilder is a pick-pocketer from New York City and he tries spoon tricks on a crowd on a boat. Henley Reeves is a sexy escape artist from Los Angeles.
 
The 4 of them get an invitation with an individual mysterious card to New York City where they discover blueprints of a magic show.
 
A year later they are known as the Four Horsemen and take over the Las Vegas stage. Their sponsor is a well-known insurance magnate, Arthur Tressler. This is last show in Vegas and they plan to rob a bank. Firstly, they ask the audience to help them select one of the audience members and they get one by the name of Etienne Forcier, for him to be tele-transported to a bank vault in Paris where he will leave a ticket stub with his signature in the middle of the money. The money is then vacuumed out of the vault back to the Las Vegas show audience.
 
FBI agent Dylan Rhodes and Interpol agent Alma Dray are assigned to the case about the bank robbery. They take the Horsemen into custody for questioning. Etienne is also taken into questioning and when Rhodes says the word “Bullshit” they learn that he has been hypnotized and the term was a trigger word.
 
After interrogating the Four Horsemen, the agents decide to let them go because they cannot charge them. The next lead from Agent Fuller is a famous magic debunker named Thaddeus Bradley whom they want to know how they ‘stole’ the money from Paris.
 
Thaddeus takes the two agents back to the Las Vegas show theatre to show them how everything was done. He explains that they made the audience think they chose Etienne while he was a victim trailed all the way from Paris and they hypnotized him to be in Las Vegas. All they did was activate him so he couldn’t see what was going on. He didn’t know he was their target. The Horsemen stole the real money earlier from the money trucks and a replaced it with flash paper.
 
Thaddeus does a show on the Horsemen about them believing in The Eye. Arthur approaches him and offers him money to withdraw his plan to ride them down. But he refuses.
 
Their next show is in Savoy Theatre and they expose their sponsor Arthur Tressler for robbing past Tressler clients out of their settlements. They make transfers out of his account to pay them back and after the FBI realize that they really robbed him they set out to get them back into custody. The Horsemen escape the FBI and head over to their headquarters where they have to destroy evidence of everything they have.
 
Meanwhile Dylan realizes that his phone has a bug and it was Atlas who replaced it at the interrogation room. Jack is asked to stay behind and destroy the paperwork. The others leave.
 
Dylan finds Jack in the joint but he outruns him with files in his hands. He steals a standard FBI vehicle and takes it to the bridge where he gets killed in a car crash. Agent Cowan takes over and they all find out that the file Jack died trying to escape with was for Elkhorn which is a company that manufactures safes. They have been investigating about the company for 5 years and the Horsemen found the files when hacking into his server after they used passwords they took from Dylan’s phone.
 
Their next step is to go to warehouse where the safe is and find that it is gone and on its way to 5 Points where Thaddeus did his first show. According to the guard it was Evans’ orders to have it moved. After Cowan exclaims with the word ‘bullshit’ they learn that he was also hypnotized when he starts to play Beethhoven’s music.  
 
The force follows the money van to where it was originally going and discovers that the safe is stuffed with balloons.
 
The remaining Horsemen elude the police again to their final show at 5 Points after a building leap where they turn into fake money.
 
Thaddeus is sent to jail when the police find the real money inside his Range Rover in the parking lot. Dylan visits Thaddeus at the jail cell and he tells the cop that he was framed.
 
This is where the story gets interesting.
 
Thaddeus goes on to tell him the safe at the warehouse wasn’t empty, a mirror made it appear as if though it was empty. The safe was still there. And that Jack didn’t die in the car crash, the other Horsemen had the same police car on the bridge and they released it with a cadaver to create a car crash.
 
Meanwhile the other Horsemen indeed find Jack at Central Park alive and kicking. He lets them in.
 
Dylan escapes a closed cell and heads over to Central Park to meet his students as he reveals himself as the fifth Horseman. They are all shocked to learn that the FBI agent Dylan Rhodes is the one behind everything. He invites them to The Eye.
 
In Paris Dylan meets Alma and he shares with her that Tressler Insurers, Elkhorn Safes, Credit Republican of Paris and Thaddeus Bradley are all connected. Alma finally adds up the pieces that Lionel Shrike was his father. He informs her that after his father died he created a persona and a detailed plan to avenge his father. They decide not to turn him in as he played the entire force defeating the ends of justice.
 
The Break Down.
 
When Dylan was a kid, his magician father Lionel Shrike died in an accident after Thaddeus’ debut show exposed his previous tricks. Elkhorn Manufactures manufactured sold defective products and cut corners and they warped when under water..
 
Tressler Insurers refused to carry out their policy when they didn’t want to pay out the Rhodes family and the bank that carried the note was Credit Republican of Paris. From then on Dylan created a persona and a plan that would work every entire detail to get some kind of justice.
 
His plan involved getting 4 solo acts that would ‘blindly follow with obedience’ his instructions according the laws of The Eye. If you take closer look at the 3-D blueprints at the beginning in New York you can see details of the first show in Vegas and also the Manhattan bridge which means Jack had to stay behind at the headquarters and escape later with the exact standard FBI vehicle where his death would be faked on the bridge.
 
In the stolen BMW Dylan gives Agent Fuller wrong directions on the radio of the pursuit seemingly by mistake to make the whole FBI behind with the chase so the ‘accident’ could work out smoothly. Fuller was chasing a ghost because Wilder drove past him. When he celebrates, just before the accident, many people misinterpret it as a sign that he is about to die, whereas he is glad he made it in front of the bus.
 
After the accident, Dylan gets a call from Thaddeus and he tells him about Dray being a ‘distraction’. See, here it’s a conversation between two magicians. But only one knows about the other. And only another magician could understand what Thaddeus is really saying. He knows about Dray being a first timer off the desk and he also knows that there is a grand trick about to happen.
 
When Dylan approaches Alma and asks her about who she really is, he is scared that she might be onto him like Thaddeus suggested. He is scared that Alma Dray, an inexperienced Interpol agent knows that he is behind all of this.
 
In the interrogation room Atlas manages to free himself off the chains and have the key inside the unused can. When Alma releases it Atlas moves Dylan’s phone aside so it doesn’t get damaged. This scene was engineered by none other than Dylan himself, so Atlas can get his phone and replace it with a duplicate so the Horsemen can stay ahead of them at all times because Dylan was a head agent of the case and would obviously use his phone to communicate with the others on the case.
 
Only when his phone starts to malfunction should he report it to his team so they don’t find anything suspicious.
 
In the plane Dylan asks Dray about how the Horsemen got so big without any outside help. He only asked that to make sure that she did not know about him as the real man behind this. Even at the bar after failing to capture the Horsemen when Dylan gets in an argument with her he asks her who she really is because she ‘came out of the blue’. The real argument wasn’t about her letting Atlas go.
 
In the second show at the Savoy theatre, Dylan planned another one when Merritt had a football team from the audience to get the ‘quarterback’ when he uses the police word ‘FREEZE’ so the hypnotized audience can get him down from capturing the Horsemen. All of this was done to so to look like Rhodes was doing his work to the fullest. Another brilliant stunt.
 
In the jet scene when the Horsemen ‘prepare’ for their next show, it seems as if Arthur threw himself into the mind games where Atlas has to get into his head and guess out his past. But the scene was a set up to get Arthur to tell the Horsemen his most confidential information like his banking information without him knowing him. Merritt obviously hypnotized Arthur to get him to join the game without making it look suspicious. If you look at the eye conversation between the Horsemen you will see.
 
A lot of people also think there is no real magic in this movie. Since the condescending black guy, Thaddeus, debunks just about every magic trick in the movie.
 
Well, there is a lot of magic in this movie. One of them is the building leap where the 3 Horsemen turn into money. How does one explain that?
 
How did the 30-year-old New York Post paper featuring a two page article on Lionel Shrike get inside Alma Dray’s Liberation newspaper in Paris? How did Dylan Rhodes escape the locked prison cell when he visited Thaddeus from behind him and then appear in front of him where the door is at?
 
In the interrogation room Merritt informs Alma about Dylan having daddy issues and that it’s her first time off the desk. So he is a real mentalist. He can also feel energy through closed doors and glass when he acknowledges Fuller and Dylan looking at him in the room. Jack disappears from inside the curtain when Dylan grabs him at the joint. And appears on the other side. It’s unexplainable, so it’s magic.
 
And also, how did Atlas get the SUCK IT card inside Thaddeus’ velveteen pocket before their second show?
 
We may never know whether the story of the cheating husband at the beginning is true or not. But we do know about Dylan having daddy issues and Alma being her first time off the desk. No one told Merritt. Well, least not about Alma. This is magic.
 
 
Thaddeus knew an unusual amount about the Horsemen plans and The Eye. So The Eye is real, or was real. He knew about the book Alma was reading called The Guardians of Horus. He even tells Arthur that whatever the grand trick is was designed long ago. How does he know this?
 
Another clue is the first meeting with Thaddeus when he tells them that they are being played because it’s a game. Only Dylan can understand him.
 
Some people claim that there is no growth in the characters and that they are shallow. Again, not true. They had a start as individual acts, Merritt was successful at one stage, even had a TV show. He was trying to do a comeback with a book he wrote about hypnosis.
 
Before they leave the joint, Henley wonders who they are working for and Jack doesn’t want to go to jail. Or get killed. Merritt is expecting a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Henley reminds them that they must stick to the plan and Merritt will get to do whatever he wants after.
 
Jack, since he is the youngest, is often treated unfairly. Even in the engineered Jet scene when he wants to speak about his part on the show. He is dismissed. Atlas and Henley used to work together back in the day and went their separate ways as Atlas was a control freak.
 
When they post a video on Youtube about Jack’s death, Merritt also says they have started something bigger than all of them. And they have to finish it. In the lift at 5 Points Henley comments that she had a year of fun even if she goes to jail. This is character development.
 
At Central Park Merritt celebrates Jack for being ‘a big boy now’.
 
The story is NOT about the Horsemen. It is about Dylan Rhodes. He is the one that grows throughout the movie. He is the one who is satisfied at the end. He is the one who had a goal. He is the one who knows what was happening and what to do.
 
After the inciting incident, Dylan gets a call from Fuller. He accepts the opportunity and goes to his office to start with the case. When he gets there, to cover his tracks, he acts like he doesn’t want anything to do with the case. His plan did not or would not involve anyone outside the bureau, much less an agent from Interpol. He didn’t see this one coming.
 
He later changes his mind when they let them go, confusing the agents. Again, to cover his tracks. When Fuller tells him about Thaddeus being in the show filming the Horsemen, he, to us, did a terrible job when he denies ever having any knowledge about the magic debunker. And only we can see this. Even when they meet Thaddeus at his offices, he had to convince everyone that he doesn’t know anything about magic or his own father, Lionel Shrike. He acts like a dummy. We are the only ones who can see this.
 
At the empty Las Vegas theatre, he did an excellent job when he ‘pretended’ that he didn’t know how they stole the money from Paris. For Alma. He had to keep up with her for most of the movie because she was onto something. She’s a researcher. A desk agent like Merritt said.
 
Of course Thaddeus won’t last in jail. And yes Arthur’s money is gone. Merritt can hypnotize people over the phone to get them to do whatever he wants. Even if Credit Republican of Paris gets its money back since the bank money is probably insured and the Elkhorn money inside the safe at the warehouse, the whole point was for Dylan was to humiliate his victims. Arthur Tressler’s insurance career is over. After they exposed his company it will be done away with.
 
Thaddeus Bradley’s ego is busted. He’ll find it very difficult to return into the business after what Dylan did to him.
 
 

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