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'Now You See Me' brings magicians to the summer movie season

'Now You See Me,' starring Morgan Freeman, Mark Ruffalo, Isla Fisher, and others, will come to theaters May 31.

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Barry Wetcher/Summit Entertainment/AP
'Now You See Me' stars (from left) Jesse Eisenberg, Dave Franco, Isla Fisher, and Woody Harrelson.
  • By Molly Driscoll Staff Writer

Where did this movie “Now You See Me” come from?

By now, an inextricable part of the summer (yes, even early May counts as part of the summer movie season now) movie hoopla is massive marketing campaigns. By the time I got to the theater to see “The Avengers” last summer, I felt like I’d heard half of Robert Downey Jr.’s snarky one-liners already in endless TV ads. 

But this movie “Now You See Me,” starring actors such as Morgan Freeman, Jesse Eisenberg, Isla Fisher, Woody Harrelson, Mark Ruffalo, and Michael Caine as, variously, a team of bank-robbing magicians and the authorities trying to discover their secrets, comes out May 31 and I recently found the trailer online having only vaguely heard of the movie. It may be that the “Iron Man 3”/”Great Gatsby”/”Star Trek” noise was merely drowning it out, but this movie seems to have been a quiet summer release so far.

Which is a shame, because the trailer looks intriguing and the cast is top-notch. It’ll be Fisher’s second appearance in a summer movie after she played mistress Myrtle Wilson in director Baz Luhrmann’s “Gatsby,” and Harrelson is coming off his well-reviewed turn in the first “Hunger Games” movie. Freeman just starred in Tom Cruise’s (tepidly received) sci-fi movie “Oblivion.”

As has been remarked by others, I kept being reminded of director Christopher Nolan’s magicians movie “The Prestige” when watching the trailer for “Now,” what with Michael Caine starring in both movies and a sequence in the “Now” trailer when a woman gets trapped in a water tank, which also occurs in “Prestige.” But considering “Prestige” was the last big magicians movie, that’s probably inevitable. And there are worse comparisons – the meticulously plotted film starring Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman was entertaining and contained a heck of a twist ending.

Check out the trailer for “Now.”

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