Now You See Me starts out okay, for maybe the first third. Jesse Eisenberg and Woody Harrelson are fun to watch in their flashy roles. Mark Ruffalo is always a welcome quantity in any film. The first robbery is fun, and Morgan Freeman’s character (the magic debunker) brings a nice, unexpected layer of dramatic complexity. All the way up to the police interrogation, it’s pretty good. You know it’s probably going to spin off into oblivion at any moment, but you are still basking in the idea that the film might actually turn out to be way better than you were expecting.

And then, of course, it spins off into total oblivion. By the end of the film, they do manage to pull almost everything together, but only just barely, and even then none of it made any sense to me.

If you want brain-fry some week night when your job has reduced you to emotional rubble, Now You See Me is just what the doctor ordered.