11) Now You See Me (2013)
The Story: A group of magicians known as the Four Horsemen (Jesse Eisenberg, Dave Franco, Woody Harrelson and Isla Fisher) confound law enforcement officers by pulling off incredible bank robberies during their shows and distribute the money to audience members. FBI agent Dylan Rhodes (Mark Ruffalo) and Interpol detective Alma Dray (Mélanie Laurent) team up to track the Horsemen and their mysterious benefactor. Their investigation expands as the duo encounter famed magician-buster Thaddeus Bradley (Morgan Freeman) and discover that the Horsemen’s activity may be tied to the death of Lionel Shrike, a magician who was exposed by Bradley and died performing a dangerous underwater stunt to regain his credibility. As the magicians consistently remain one step ahead of their pursuers, Rhodes starts to question how much he can trust his new partner.
The Twist: The Horsemen pull off one final trick – stealing a large safe and showering a willing crowd with the millions of dollars it contained – and then disappear. The money given to the crowd turns out to be fake, and the real money shows up in Bradley’s car. He is hauled away to a jail cell and denounced as the Horsemen’s benefactor. Rhodes arrives at his cell to discuss the case with him. With Bradley behind bars, Rhodes suddenly reveals that he was on the side of the Horsemen all along. Shrike was his father; the heists were designed to take revenge on those responsible for Shrike’s death, including the man who denounced him. Rhodes then meets the Horsemen, reveals his true identity as a master magician (and their mysterious benefactor) and welcomes them into a top-secret society of magicians called The Eye.
Why It Sucks: For most of its length, Now You See Me is an enjoyably light, fast-paced thriller. Then its big reveal arrives, and everything falls apart faster than a house of cards in a hurricane. Rhodes is introduced as a dopey and ineffective FBI agent and remains that way up until the last five minutes, until the screenwriters see fit to reveal him as an evil genius who has been pulling the strings the entire time. What?
So, in order to wreak unnecessarily complicated vengeance on those he deems responsible for his father’s death (the guy who debunked him, the makers of a shoddily-constructed safe that warped during the trick and the high-powered finance guys who refused to pay insurance on Shrike’s death), Rhodes rose up through the ranks of the FBI for more than thirty years, arousing no suspicion whatsoever despite totally sucking at his job, and serendipitously wound up on the case of the Horsemen so that a series of unlikely coincidences could allow him to get away with his hare-brained scheme.
While all of this mayhem is going on, Rhodes seduces the Interpol detective with his stupid, stupid puppy-dog eyes and then admits to her that he’s been behind everything the whole time. Instead of, I don’t know, turning him in, she just continues to flirt with him and walks off into the sunset, condemning Bradley to spend the rest of his life in prison. Because that’s fair.
The film’s tagline, “The closer you look, the less you’ll actually see,” is the perfect way to describe its ending – as I struggle to find any logical explanation for the inane drivel that goes on its final minutes, all I end up with is a headache I don’t deserve.
So, there you have it. A bunch of great films that were completely derailed by horrible plot twists. Did we miss any? Let us know in the comments below!
