Gorgon Reviews

I saw the trailer for Quartet once, probably. I think. Yeah, just once. Looked interesting. Comedy about a group of old people musicians. They might sleep around.

Then I realized. Literally, just now, that I actually saw a trailer for A Late Quartet, and not Quartet. Yep, two different movies about old people musicians within six months of each other probably. That explains why I thought I saw cellos on the cover of Quartet. Whoops.

Hey, statistically half of that applause is probably for the other film. Gloat less, please.

In the UK, there is a retirement home for older musicians. Basically, every single one of them end up going too, if they were a big deal, they are totally there. Strange that none of them just live out their life in luxury and want to go to the retirement home.

Well, despite all the big names, the retirement home is constantly fighting to stay alive. They have a yearly gala to raise money to try and stay afloat, where they all put on a show of music and singing. Some dancing too, maybe.

Big news! Jean Horton (Maggie Smith), famed opera singer is totally joining their ranks now that she has a bad hip. But, gossip side, she was supposed to marry Reginald Paget (Tom Courtenay), but cheated on him and left him broken hearted. She might not have known he was at the same home, even though it makes perfect sense.

Well, Reginald’s good friends, Wilf Bond (Billy Connolly) and Cissy (Pauline Collins), decided that they need to convince Jean to sing in the gala with them a special piece. A famous Quartet that they all used to do back in the day.

But Jean doesn’t want to, because she is worried she can’t sing as well anymore. Not to mention the awkwardness of being around Reginald. Oh boy, if they do convince her, will they actually be good? Also featuring Michael Gambon as the Gala director, and Sheridan Smith as the head nurse.

Maggie Smith’s contract says she cannot appear more than twice in the same review.

Fuck this movie. Shit. Like, nothing happened. This is the first time director role for Dustin Hoffman, and I couldn’t be more disappointed with the end result. It is actually just some secret love song for famous opera singers and musicians in the 50s to the 80s, and they might have used actual people to play the other house guests. So most of the film was old people singing to change between scenes, which is fine as a transition, but the scenes were never really that good.

It was slow. But more importantly I noticed something. The practicing for the gala was shown in a montage. I was getting worried they wouldn’t actually give us the group singing. After all, they are actors not singers. Lo and behold, when it came time for them to perform, we got jack shit from the actual actors, making this film feel like 100 minute of just teasing us. Come on, let Maggie Smith get her sing on, fuckers.

The only redeeming quality for this movie, and for why it is not a 0 out of 4, is for Billy Connolly. Hot damn, his character was hilarious, and pretty fantastic.

1 out of 4.

Hooray, review 800! Are you excited? Well, too bad. Because I am excited. Like normal, you can check out the rest of my Milestone reviews by clicking that link that I just provided.

Because Twilight is over, I have decided to go the “Movie So Awesome, it must be talked about in more than 500 words,” and this one was suggested by a reader.

Shoot ‘Em Up. Have you heard of it? You should have. It came out in 2007 and basically attempted to make one of the most over the top, most ridiculous, gun shooting based movie. More ridiculous than Smokin’ Aces even. Although this movie doesn’t feature a dead Ben Affleck. I also am going to give a lot of spoilers for this movie, but really, I doubt words and straight pictures will ruin the experience for you.

Let’s talk about Smith (Clive Owen). He really likes carrots.

If you don’t eat your vegetables kiddy. Or we might have to force you.

The movie begins with Smith sitting on a bench. A very pregnant woman (Ramona Pringle) runs by, panting heavily, and scared, and it becomes obvious she is being chased by a hitman off to kill her. That doesn’t seem fucking nice at all. So Smith kills him with that carrot. Fuckin’ A.

This freaks out the woman, who goes into labor. Too bad a SMALL ARMY OF PEOPLE attack the shit out of him. So he has to play doctor, easing her through the pregnancy, while shooting the bad guys. This is literally five minutes into the film.

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Seriously, eat the carrot. It will help your vision, and help you shoot people.

Well fuck, while breastfeeding, the mom gets shot in the head. By fucking Paul Giamatti, who really wants that baby dead. He even has a special pistol that requires a thumb print to fire, so do all of his men. That doesn’t help Smith, when he wants to use it. Unless he cuts off someone hand that is.

Oh yeah, this whole time he has a baby in his hands too, just trying to survive. Because they want the baby dead!

Babies are important. Why in this movie? We are not sure. Maybe he will grow up to be president?

Why is a gun better than a wife? Because you can put a silencer on a gun. Hyuck hyuck hyuck hyuck. Paul Giamatti is hilarious.

Either way, eventually Smith doesn’t give a shit anymore. He wants to get rid of the baby, deciding to just leave him in a park on one of those playground merry go round things. Well, they try to snipe the baby. Fuck. So he does what he has do, and SHOOTS THE FUCKING PLAYGROUND ROUNDABOUT THING to make it spin, so the baby can’t be sniped. What! What! What!

Yeah, fine, let’s get the baby, and let’s find a way to feed it. He needs milk.

“Fuck you, ya fucking fuckers”. Actual line during this scene.

To the brothel! Why? Because they have fetish stuff going on. Including a lactating whore. Donna Quintano (Monica Bellucci). Great, now the baby can survive later. I guess. In fact, she turns out to be double useful, hooking on the street to get some money to get the baby a bulletproof vest. Because why the fuck not.

Babies need protecting. Spoilers, they end up having sex later. Guess what? People attack them during it, but is Smith going to stop the sex? Hell no. He is going to finish, and shoot some bitches.

That was a double joke there. Talk about shooting your load.

They also go back to his normal hideout. Oh yeah, I am totally telling this out of order. Not even mad yo.

Well, it turns out they try to kill him there too. So he hides the baby and woman in the dumbwaiter. More deaths happen, but even more so, his entire staircase is full of people ready to take him out and he needs to get downstairs. How do you take them out? Dominoes? Nope. Too simple. You need a rope from the ceiling to the ground, you need to slide down that rope, and AK shoot everyone in a killer fucking spiral of doom.

That’s what you need to do.

This is like The Boondock Saints scene, but 23x greater.

They eventually find out the baby was part of some sort of genetic testing. Not a super soldier. But at least one man is supplying all the sperm. Kinky.

This is all wrapped up in a conspiracy of course. Maybe an anti-gun senator? Maybe going against Hammersmith (Stephen McHattie), a gun supplier? Either way, it will lead to a shootout in a gun factory. WHICH MEANS A SHIT TON OF GUNS FOR EVERYONE TO SHOOT. YEAHHHH.

But it would be too simple to just shoot all the guns. No, he needs to set gun booby traps, all attached by strings, letting him just take out everyone. DOES THIS MAKE ANY SENSE? NO? Well it shouldn’t. Because SHOOTING YEAH!

Not a relevant picture to this part of the plot.

I am running out of time. Here is a list of more ridiculous shit that happens in this movie.

A gun is used as an engagement ring.
Everything can be used as a weapon.
Babies are fucking doable.
A plane ride and an assassination.
A SKYDIVING SHOOTOUT.
And lets not forget shooting bullets out of your fingers by sticking your hand in flames.

Fucking fuck.

MORE CARROT BASED DEATHS. There are at least five.

Like I said above. Shoot ‘Em Up is one of the wildest movies I have ever seen. The action is always there, the one-liners are very one-liney, and the deaths start over the top and only escalate. There are no real normal deaths in this film, everything is ridiculous.

I don’t even have anything else to say. I described some stuff, you should see this thrill ride. It is more ridiculous than a video game.

3 out of 4.

When you first heard about The Internship, you thought one of three things:

“Oh great, a movie where the jokes are only at the expense of nerds and old people trying to be hip!”

“Oh great, a giant advertisement movie for Google!”

“Oh great, an Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn movie trying to recapture the magic that happened with Wedding Crashers in 2005!”

Well, to be fair, I think all of these ended up being true.

Because why the fuck not, they also play some quidditch.

Billy (Vaughn) and Nick (Wilson) are a great team and have been for decades. They sell watches and they have personality. Sales have been down this year, and they find out in the middle of a potential big sale that their company has folded. Great, what are two unskilled salesmen to do with the economy like it is?

Well, get a job at Google, of course! Or at least an interview, for an internship, that could lead to a job. While not being extremely qualified candidates, they are able to smooth talk their way into the intern process, because not every applicant should be a perfect nerd 20-something with no actual life experience.

Needless to say, they are not popular amongst the other applicants. Only one team of interns will be guaranteed to receive jobs by the end of the summer and when it comes time to pick teams, they are stuck with the other nerds who weren’t picked (Tiya Sicar, Tobit Raphael, Dylan O’Brien) and the newest and most nervous group manager (Josh Brener, who you may remember last summer in this Samsung Galaxy S3 commercial before movies).

As expected, this turns into a group of ragtag individuals, trying to work together to overcome the odds and become the top team by summers end. Along the way, Nick has to try and woo a higher up Google employee (Rose Byrne), Billy has to overcome his inability succeed, and they all have to figure out ways to beat the supergroup made by Graham Hawtrey (Max Minghella), and also convince the head of the interns (Aasif Mandvi) that they aren’t complete losers.

A comedy like this of course has a lot of cameos, including Will Ferrell, Rob Riggle, and Josh Gad.

Heh…heh…heh…Noogle.I know the entire idea of this movie probably is a turn off to a lot of you. It looks formulaic, almost like a 1990s comedy (Another aspect of the film that I cannot defend). But it also has something else that is hard to value that really turns it into a decent movie. It has heart.

Wilson and Vaughn have amazing chemistry together, which is a fact we already knew. But it is amplified so well into this film! The dialogue is just so great, the two are able to make the entire thing still feel real and natural.

The Internship is not the funniest film of the year, no where close, but reports say that I giggled pretty consistently throughout it. The film accurately also showed the pressures that college graduates face today, where they can be perfect their entire life and still have trouble/stress once they hit the real world.

I did hate a few of the “speeches” by the end of the film, when they were announcing the winners. I think they cheapened the results by going about them that way, and could have easily been more clever about it. I’d say The Internship is worth checking out, but only if you are want a feel good story and if it is a matinee.

3 out of 4.

Originally, I felt that the ad campaign for The Purge came a bit later than most movies. I didn’t hear about it or see the trailer until Evil Dead, which was in March!

But they really ramped up the ad campaign in the last few weeks, almost to annoyance. Needless to say (because I am a coward), the trailer frightened me, and gave me great hope that this movie would provide scares along with philosophical debates about ethics, morals, and the human spirit.

The year is 2022 and America is a peaceful country! Unemployment is less than 1%, and there is basically no crime. Why? Because we have changed the way America works! Every year, for 12 hours, everything is legal in the United States. Murder, theft, you name it. No police or firefighters will be on duty, everything is fair game. It lets people vent out their frustrations, and become wild animals if they so choose.

A lot of rich people choose to stay inside with fancy security systems. Like James Sandin (Ethan Hawke), a fancy security systems salesman. He has the fanciest securest house on the block, because of his profitable year, so his wife (Lena Headey) and two kids (Max Burkholder, Adelaide Kane) are set!

But once The Purge begins, the son sees a homeless man (Edwin Hodge) running down the street. He noobs it up, opens the door, and lets the homeless man in. This opens an unfortunate can of worms when an unruly mob of masked college students clamor outside of their villa, wanting to get their purge on. The polite leader (Rhys Wakefield) gives them the chance to turn the homeless man in, and they won’t attack the family. But if they wait too long, they will tear down their walls and kill everyone inside. Oh snap.

Looks like we have quite an ethical conundrum on our hands. Can they willingly send out a homeless man to his death? Can James willingly let a man die, if the life of his family is potentially on the line?

I mean, he looks trustworthy, that polite leader. The first thing I noticed about The Purge is that it is almost painfully short. 85 minutes in length! That is usually a warning sign. That means the plot doesn’t last long enough to fill a full movie. Or they realize the idea gets old really quick.

But the length was really appropriate for the plot, and I never felt like it dragged too much. There was some long scenes that were just heavy in suspense, but when you are wandering around your house in the dark, looking for strangers, you aren’t just going to run around every corner.

It was somewhat predictable, with the plotlines, yet equally surprising. I loved watching Ethan Hawke go on a kill streak to save his house. I would have stood up and cheered, if I didn’t respect normal movie watching practices.

It could have delved more into the ethical nature of the entire Purge, but I liked that it used subtle features to tell us the backgrounds of various characters, without outright saying them to our face. I do think they harped on the idea of murder too much, when other laws, like downloading music and stealing a car are just as legal. Time to get the misses some new bling, I say.

The movie is full of jump scares with only a few scenes that made me leave my seat, but I think it still is an interesting addition to the horror genre.

3 out of 4.

The reason it took me so long to see Liberal Arts is because for whatever reason, I refused to watch it outside of a RedBox rental. Yet somehow it was rented out for months, and I just got slapped in the mouth over and over again.

That doesn’t make any sense. But if you saw my review for Happythankyoumoreplease, you would have seen my comparisons between Josh Radnor and Zach Braff, getting their indie movies on. But now Josh Radnor did a second one? Come on, Braff is way behind now. Stop it Radnor.

But please, continue being the old dude at college parties. That’s for cool people.

Jesse Fisher (Radnor) is a 40 something man living in NYC and just being kind of miserable. He has a job, has a life, but there is no fun. But when his professor, Peter Hoberg (Richard Jenkins), announces his retirement (in mother fucking Iowa) and wants one of his favorite students to show up. Sure. Why not. It is his favorite professor too.

Well, during the festivities, he meets Edie Parker (Elizabeth Olsen), a 20-year old college student who is all sorts of perky and happy. In fact, they go on a date. Not weird. Kind of weird. Nothing happens. But they agree to write each other and exchange music.

That gets them all excited. Then they see each other again. For sex? Maybe for sex. He also meets an old teacher he used to like (Allison Janney), a depressed individual who likes the same books he does (John Magaro) and a person who may not be real who is helping him achieve his desires (Zac Efron).

Aww yeah. Again, maybe sex will happen. Maybe.

Is this sex? I don’t even know.

So what happens when Josh Radnor tries to out indie Zach Braff? Well, it actually works out really well.

First off, Elizabeth Olsen is the younger sister of the twins. She also seems to be totally sane. She won a lot of awards for her role in Martha Marcy May Marlene, but I haven’t seen it yet. Well, clearly I should, because Olsen rocked this movie as well.

Liberal Arts deals with a lot of tough subjects. There are multiple supplots outside of the “Go to college, maybe deflower someone who really likes you” subplot, yet they all also deal with Radnor’s character. One man, many subplots. I love the random ones with the depressed kid, and a dazed and confused Zac Efron. It also took me awhile to recognize him as Efron, not at all expecting him to have a role like that.

There are plenty of awkward scenes as well, dealing with a man who is trying to find his place in life, and going back to his roots to figure it out. Everyone acts well in it, and it doesn’t go the way you’d expect it. Shit, there is even a discussion about Twilight in it, without mentioning the book title.

I’d say check it out. You will realize that Radnor might be a better director/writer than a sitcom star.

3 out of 4.

Originally on this website I refused to review Horror movies, because I was a coward. That means once I got over it, I had a lot of backlog to catch up on. So if you have been seeing a lot more horror on average, now you know why! Because there is a lot of shit out there, and you need to know which of that shit is good and which of that shit is bad.

With a movie called Chernobyl Diaries, you might be able to figure out which side of the fence it falls on.

Or maybe it falls on top of the fence itself, and falls awkwardly on both sides.

This movie began with the song Alright by Supergrass. You’ve heard it, trust me. I was confused.

But lets run with it. Traveling around Europe can be exciting for people in their early 20s (and well, anyone). Chris (Jesse McCartney) and his girlfriend Natalie (Olivia Dudley) and third friend Amanda (Devin Kelley) are running around Europe, being young and free. They stop in Kiev to visit Chris’ brother, Paul (Jonathan Sadowski), and he likes to live life on the edge.

Paul hears about this “extreme tour” of Pripyat, the abandoned company town which sits in the shadow of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Oh snap. It would be lead by tough guy Uri (Dimitri Diatchenko), with another couple (Nathan Phillips, Ingrid Bolso Berdal) joining them.

But when they get there, they are stopped by the Ukranian military. For some reason, they cannot go into the abandoned city today. Huh. Too bad. What? They will sneak in. Good idea. It is pretty cool place, very eerie. But when the van doesn’t start before dusk when they try to leave, they get nervous. Apparently someone has sabotaged their vehicle. Now they are stranded in an abandon city. Oh boy, what could go wrong?

“Who’s there? Is that you, Fred? Fred, stop being weird.”

I wonder what the survivors of the Chernobyl explosion feel about this movie. Actually, no, I don’t care. If we had to worry about offending people before we made movies, a lot of movies wouldn’t get made. I can’t have that happening.

Dumb kids were being dumb in this movie, and the timing felt off. Their second day in the city seemed incredibly short, I am not sure why it took them so long to do the various things.

But at the same time, making this movie with what they worked at, it was surprisingly okay. There was a variety into the deaths of these poor saps. They weren’t just disappearing off the side of the camera, which well, some did. The ending was a bit expected, but still glad they went that route. It unfortunately opens up room for more of these, but I don’t want to see another one.

You know what? This movie had a bear. A big fucking bear in it. I love bears. Bears should be in more movies. It is not a complete pile of shit. How could it be, it has a bear!

2 out of 4.

Yeah! War! Modern War! None of this sissy Vietnam movie crap.

We need an updated war movie. Preferably not one with people in deserts either. A sexy war movie, with a new opponent that isn’t a country, but maybe a small organization or a single terrorist? Something that you wouldn’t send an army after, but instead an elite fighting group of soldiers to take out and handle. Maybe, just maybe, you could send the Navy SEALS after them? They are exiting. They got Obama.

So why not make a movie designed to show off how cool they are? Like what Act of Valor does. Outside of the main unheard of actors, it has real Navy SEALS in the background to get people pumped up for war and the navy.

Actual Navy SEALS? Bonkers! But look look, there are actual GUNS as well!

The movie begins with a terrorist attack in the Philippians. It is a fucked up one too. Sure it takes out a US Ambassador, but also a dozen or more school kids. Whoa. Kid deaths. You know this is not a Spielberg movie. Who is to blame? A Chechen terrorist (hmmm, topical) named Abu Shabal(Jason Cottle).

You know what? I am already bored as fuck going over this plot summary. They have to go get him. There might be some drug smuggling stuff going on too. One of the seal team members is going to be a dad soon, so we know we have to watch his story closely. It’d be a shame if he died.

I don’t even want to tag any of the main people in this movie, because they are all SEALs. You know what that means? It means we are getting an action movie with shitty acting. Okay, that is probably normal for most action movies, sure. But this is even more shitty, as it is just regular people trying to convey emotion on camera.

Thankfully they focus more on the fighting and stealthing around. I guess.

Fuck the guns. This is an actual swamp. ACTUAL SEALS IN ACTUAL SWAMPS.

They should have used real actors for this. I don’t buy any of this bullshit of “the filmmakers realized that no actors could realistically portray or physically fill the roles they had written and the actual SEALs were drafted to star in the film.” That’s crap, actors do that all the time. It is called acting.

So instead we get a movie with a bunch of literal no names (I can’t tell if the names in the credits were changed to protect identities, or if they are their real names but no one cares) in the most generic feeling action movie ever. Honestly, maybe because they were going for realism? It just bored the crap out of me. You can read the very detailed plot description on its wiki link if you want, I just get so bored beginning to talk about it, I’d rather link you to my biggest competitor. Shh, wiki is so a competitor.

Maybe I am even more bugged out that the SEAL team members were basically forced to do this film. To use as a promotional campaign. A really fucking long promo ad. Maybe it will get people excited, but I doubt after the Somalian Pirate incident they needed more press.

Basically a superliminal version of Yvan Eht Nioj.

0 out of 4.

Some things in life are timeless.

A lot of those things are classic movie villains. Sure you have your Draculas and your Frankensteins. But in the 80s we were introduced to a new batch. Like Jason! And Freddy Krueger.

So with these franchises already past the point of overabundance, I don’t care if we get a remake. Why the hell not? It couldn’t get worse. They could even change everything about how it got started, and I probably wouldn’t care. Just give me cool deaths or something, maybe real scares, and make him terrifying.

Well, right now he looks like burnt beans. I mean that kid from Even Stevens.

Guess what. In this movie, people are dying in their dreams. There are Nightmares On Elm Street, and they are deadly.

Dean Russell (Kellan Lutz) is flipping his shit at a diner, and it appears that he slits his own throat in a dream like sequence. He is being attacked by a strange man, burnt face, hat, blades on one hand. Oh yes, the Freddy Krueger (Jackie Earle Haley) is all up on his life.

So I feel strange talking about the plot outline of this movie. It is fucking A Nightmare On Elm Street. He kills people in dreams, because he died a long time ago for being a pedo. SOmehow magic is involved. Some of the teens begging to die include Katie Cassidy, Kyle Gallner, and Thomas Decker. Rooney Mara gets to be our main lady, so she might survive. We shall see.

Oh, is Freddy a teacher now? There is no joke here.

Wait, did you see the cast listing? Outside of Mara, they have basically Twilighted this series. Maybe the original had some big teen stars too, but they didn’t have Twilight. This one is more obvious.

What really bugged me was the high quality of the camera work. It made the movie seem fake, having it set to ultra HD standards. The 80s movies are gritty, because that was the only quality available, but it also added to the fear. The crisp quality made me actually hate the movie, which I don’t think I ever said before. It just took me out of the moment.

Rehashing the story felt silly the whole time. Another problem? None of the deaths felt particularly creative or anything. The plot to fight back was stupid. The ending was stupid. The movie/remake was stupid.

1 out of 4.

I am watching The Iceman on the recommendation from someone who hasn’t even seen the dang thing. They just heard it was good from other people. Thankfully, I am glad I took that advice.

The opening of this movie starts with a really awkward coffee date between Richard “Richie” Kuklinksi (Michael Shannon) and Deb (Winona Ryder) that doesn’t seem to be going well. She’s telling him how she thinks he’s not talking enough and then makes a comment about his creepy tattoo. Because of this, he gets visibly offended and she apologizes profusely. However, two scenes and several years later they’re married and having a baby!

That tells us one of two things: Either bad first dates could end up well, or their bad decision making has been consistent.

Ray Liotta is in a film about mob guys? Who saw that coming?
After Richie’s job with a Disney cartoon dubbing *cough*porn*cough* studio gets eliminated, Richie is offered a job by the mob boss as a hit man.  Turns out, Richie is already pretty cold-hearted dude, due to some serious childhood issues, so he has no problems gracefully accepting the position. After all, he’s got a wife and a kid and apparently she’s spending her days looking at expensive houses instead of quietly cleaning the one she has. That bitch.

After years spent as a contract killer picking off everybody, including business associates and long time friends, it’s clear that the only people he cares about are his wife and kids. He doesn’t care about them enough to tell him the truth or get a real job or anything, no, but he will kill anyone that gets in the way of him supporting his family.

“Tax man? Dead! School Principal? Dead! Door to door salesman? Dead! Lazy crosswalk guard? Double dead!”Due to the fact that this is based on real events (and there was a documentary about it roughly 20 years ago) it’s not much of a spoiler to say “Hey! The police caught him!”  The finale includes a really crazy monologue from Richie, and according to the history books he never saw his family again.

What really gets me about this film is that it’s so intense but void of a lot of high powered action. You are only going to get one car chase, and it is not as you would expect. No one is going to fight on top of a train, but I feel like that’s better reserved for Bond.

Also, I was incredibly fascinated by the casting choices for Richie and Deb. Shannon is such a HUGE guy and Ryder is this tiny little thing and every time he embraces her or even just stands next to her it looks like she’s going to disappear into him.

Overall it was a really captivating movie and I’d put this on my “watch again” list.

4/5
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The first time I saw the trailer for Now You See Me, I got all sorts of excited. A movie with magic and illusions? Heck yeah! It has been seven years since we really had movies on the subject, when we were blessed with The Prestige and The Illusionist, both of which were quite enjoyable.

Oh. I meant good movies about magicians. Sorry. I tend to forget about The Incredible Burt Wonderstone already (and that was in March!).

Look at this gaggle of fucks right here. Basically every star in this movie! Wait…

To start the film, we are introduced to four different street magicians. Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), the fast talking kind of a dick magician, McKinney (Woody Harrelson), the formerly big mentalist, Henley (Isla Fisher), the former assistant turned pro, and Jack Wilder (Dave Franco), the thieving tricky magician. They are all invited to a secret gathering, where they find blue prints to pull off great magical feats. A year later, they are calling themselves The Four Horsemen and headlining in Las Vegas and around the world!

Their new benefactor is Arthur Tressler (Michael Caine), a big big millionaire, and they just used a magic trick to rob a bank in Paris. Huh? What?

Yep. But the FBI and lead detective Dylan Rhodes (Mark Ruffalo) are in a pickle. Can they arrest them for a magic trick, with no real evidence? Well, no evidence unless they assume magic is real. The answer is no. Even with Thaddeus Bradley (Morgan Freeman), an ex-magician who has a web-series explaining and spoiling other magician’s secrets, they don’t have enough to actually put them away.

Rhodes and his new partner from Interpol (Melanie Laurent) have to follow the four horsemen across America, as their tricks get more and more daring, and steal from more and more powerful sources. But are they doing these tricks alone, or is there a Fifth Horsemen secretly pulling the strings? Also featuring Michael Kelly as an FBI agent. I feel bad for not including him.

In a previous version of this review, I used famous character names instead of actor names for the plot description (like Mark Zuckerberg, or The Hulk) but Dave Franco kind of ruined that. No one really knows who he is.

Why are you so befuddled Ruffalo? Surprised I decided to leave Eisenberg out of the pictures?The more I think about the ending to Now You See Me, the more I get angry at inconsistencies. That is what I get for thinking about a movie afterwards I guess. But alas, my burden to carry as a reviewer.

In a movie like this, there will be red herrings, because they know you are trying to guess the ending the entire time. After all, clearly the fifth horseman will be someone in the movie, not some random stranger popping up at the end! But when the reveal happens it just doesn’t seem to make much since the harder you look at the film.

The movie spends a decent amount of time focusing on explaining the tricks, thanks to Freeman’s character, but at the same time, there are things done only toby the power of CGI that kind of take the mysticism out of it. We are left wondering if magic is actually real in this movie, or if it is all explainable like the normal real world. Honestly, by the end, I am still not sure.

At the same time, it still was a bit entertaining. I think Woody Harrelson was my favorite player in the movie, by far. Which is great, because I finally saw Rampart recently and didn’t have a good time doing it. As the mentalist, he was pretty funny. Ruffalo was okay as the main cop character, but definitely not the type of role he is used to. After all, aside from The Avengers and this film, every role he has had has basically been in an indie movie.

Now You See Me did a good job of playing with our mind, giving every possible misdirection in the book. But it in no way will stand up to the previous mentioned magic films in a year or two. However, it is still at least a little bit cool.

2 out of 4