My nephew accompanied my daughter and me to see “Now You See Me,” a pleasant enough summer diversion in the form of a magic–themed caper movie. I won’t reveal the twist to you, except to say that it didn’t take very long to figure out what it was. My nephew, who had seen the movie already, was surprised when I leaned over to him halfway through the movie and accurately predicted what was going to happen. I reveled in my own brilliance for the rest of the night, except that it really doesn’t take an Einstein to recognize the limited “big twist” options that writers have in a two-hour piece of entertainment.
In this flick, four magicians are brought together to execute an elaborate, globe-trotting criminal plan plotted by an unknown mastermind behind the scenes. It goes without saying, then, that the movie, in order to be dramatically satisfying, has to eventually uncover the identity of the hidden genius driving the plot.
I’m not going to spoil it outright for you, but I’m now going to give you the tools to create your own spoilers. If that’s unacceptable, I hereby provide a chicken exit for you to walk out of this particular post right now. Don’t worry – I won’t judge you.
Possible candidates for the hidden genius in question are limited solely to the characters who receive the majority of screen time in the film. Essentially, that’s only eight people – the four magicians carrying out the plot, along with Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, Mark Ruffalo, and that French chick whose name I don’t remember.
Conceivably, or even probably, if this ludicrously elaborate scheme were being enacted in the real world, the mastermind would turn out to be someone else entirely. Life’s cast of characters is far too large to fit on a single movie marquee. But in a movie, that’s no fun. For a film to be entertaining and exciting, we have to care about the major players, which requires filmmakers to condense reality into a two-hour timeframe with a manageable population size of people that matter. If the twist involves someone who doesn’t matter, then the audience doesn’t care.
As the story unfolds, it becomes clear very quickly that the four magicians are disqualified from mastermind status. Each of them is recruited by the mastermind, who hides his/her identity underneath a gray hoodie. If that mastermind is one of the magicians themselves, then it would require strange narrative gyrations to explain why they bothered to get someone else to hoodie up and extend the invitation.
So that leaves Caine, Freeman, Ruffalo, and Frenchy.
Caine’s character loses $150 million as a result of the plot and spends most of the movie bent on revenge, which pretty much counts him out, too. That leaves three potential candidates, and the movie goes out of its way to implicate Freeman early on. But how boring is that? They keep telling you it’s Freeman, it’s Freeman, it’s Freeman, and then it turns out to be – Freeman? No, for the twist to have any impact, it has to be somebody you would never suspect. Both of the two potential candidates left fit that description, and one of them fits the description more than the other one does.
And there it is.
Once you recognize the limitations of the cinematic form, it’s very hard not to see the big twists waiting in the wings. This summer’s blockbusters episode with them, and all them have been kind of stupid. I made the mistake of going to the Tom Cruise star vehicle “Oblivion,” which pretty much gave away the twist in the trailer. Cruise thinks that he’s on the side of the angels fighting aliens, but since Morgan Freeman, who apparently decided to spend his summer vacation in movies with lame twists, makes an appearance in the trailer, you learn that the aliens he thinks he’s fighting aren’t aliens at all. So you know even before the movie starts that Cruise is a dupe working for the bad guys. The movie offers some other, dopier twists involving clones and spouses and such, but once you recognize the basic plot structure, those twists are only mildly diverting at best.
“Star Trek Into Darkness,” however, can’t even offer mild diversion. It’s the movie with the flat-out dumbest twist of this or perhaps any season.
Tell me, how is it an exciting twist if the characters in the movie couldn’t care less about it? When John Harrison announces he’s Khan, the soundtrack strikes an ominous chord and the camera holds for a reaction shot, but Kirk and Spock are entirely nonplussed. “Okay, great, you’re Khan,” they’re thinking. “So who’s Khan? Is that name supposed to mean something to us?”
Perhaps the best twist of the summer, and one that I did not see coming, was the moment in “Iron Man 3” when we discover who Ben Kingsley really is. It works because there’s never any hint that he isn’t who he’s initially presented to be, especially since there were dramatically satisfying ways to make the movie even if the twist not been part of the plot. From my perspective, it’s only a good twist if it’s a choice, not a necessity. That’s usually the only way it can come as a genuine surprise.
And yes, I’m aware of all the fanboy rage about how inconsistent the movie was with the comic book version of this character, but I personally hadn’t read enough Iron Man comic books to mind.
I have nothing more to say on the subject. I sleep now.
Comments are closed.