The opening is solid and promises a fast paced, cleverly laid out plot with unique characters and a long-term payoff: the reveal of a secret character. What follows sure is fast paced but also laughable in terms of character building and cleverness. Take for instance the final twist, the chararcter reveal: it brags about how insanely clever it is while completely ignoring that it forgot the setup to the payoff. The setup to the main plot point! But it's by no means the only one lacking foreshadowing or at least coherence. Twists and reveals are thematically particularily interesting in a piece on stage magic, but most of the turns come out of complete nowhere, defy any logic and sometimes even invalidate previously, apparently carefully established plot points. Another symptom of this sickness are the "magic tricks", that in a number of cases are just flatout high fantasy literal magic, sometimes poorly explained by throwaway lines or just dumped on the viewer in the hope that the insane frequence of plot turns won't leave any time to ask questions. The characters also fall victim to missing foresight: the initially very intriguing mystery about the four horsemen and their final motivation actually never gets lifted and leaves them as ultimately mindless plot devices. As a result, the amount of cringe in the final two scenes that this mess of a plot culminates in is simply awe-inducing.

There could have been a world of trickery and deception to be playfully explored in the context of professional magicians, but all the movie does is throw the viewer a ton of impossible to chew bones and require them to swallow those with next to no help. All the while bathing itself in its aura of self-proclaimed genius.