There’s about two ways to show magic on screen — the first is demonstrating the tricks, usually in an unbroken shot (if they’re smart), and hope it’s almost like being there in person. When Danny Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg) is introduced, it looks like they’re going this way. He asks someone from the crowd to pick a card, and he flips through the deck. He says he went too fast, so he does it again. Now we’re seeing this from the face in the crowd’s perspective, so the trick is played like it’s for us.
One card is shown a millisecond longer than the others, and that fraction is so perfectly timed that you notice it, but don’t notice whether you’re supposed to notice it. When the cards are flipped through again, you see it again. Then, when Atlas fans out the deck and asks if it’s in there and you don’t notice it, you realize you’ve been fooled. How that sequence is timed is so good, it’s the show-stopper.
The second way is to focus on the showmanship, and we get that in the following bit with Merritt Osbourne (Woody Harrelson), a gifted hypnotist but, more accurately, grifter who can pick up visual cues from marks, expose their darkest secrets, then blackmail them.
And while those two beats work very well, the movie never quite reaches that level again, nor does it decide which way to stick with. The succeeding two magicians we meet, Jack Wilder (Dave Franco), a straight-up thief, and Henley Reeves (Ilsa Fisher), a straight-up escape artist whose routine isn’t anything different from your standard Penn & Teller stunt — except, without, you know, Penn & Teller.
