...and Alfred Pennyworth. I thought it was a great movie, one of my favorites of last year. Very lavish and fun.
I thought it was a pretty interesting movie until the completely idiotic ending ruined the whole thing. There were no hint towards it. It was just a twist for the sake of having a twist.
Yeah, made me hate the movie. It's like they tried to be clever with inception style twists, but the problem was that the writing couldn't quite pull it off. Of course, doesn't help that I had seen this movie about a week after I'd seen American Hustle, another similar heist type of movie, which I feel had done much better in pulling it off. So, it only reinforced my opinion about good writing. It's ironic though, that they had a famous magician as their consultant to make sure they'd gotten the magic aspects right, to choose camera angles to capture the feeling of seeing the tricks being done live, and there are moments of brilliance, like in the beginning with the cards. But in the end, all of that doesn't really matter, due to the CGI particularly at the end with the projections on the building. It had an interesting concept that just couldn't quite keep itself together. For a movie all about illusions, I had trouble feeling convinced of the illusion they were trying to sell.
It's odd because of course even real illusions are the very definition of fake, but still, using CGI just felt like cheating. I mean if you're going to try to convince people that these characters are great illusionists, then the least they could have done was to pull off the tricks in-camera. Indeed, the whole point of the art-form is to get the audience to suspend disbelief and for a split second believe what they just saw was real. What they ended up with was a lot of grandstanding and some physically impossible tricks done mostly in post. Also, the script wasn't nearly as clever as it seemed to think it was.
If you want to see a lame movie with twists that make no sense, check out Basic with John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson. It seems like they had a script where everything made sense, then a producer wanted something changed, then another producer wanted something else changed, but those changes caused a domino effect elsewhere in the script that no one bothered to correct, and you're left with one big mess because of all these chefs in the kitchen and they're all trying to make something different.
As I've said before, this film is a sequel to The Avengers: It also explains why the movie makes no goddamn sense.