A self-taught critic and genuine movie geek
My first thought was that this film would at least explain some of the secrets behind the magic tricks they featured. And it does, though sadly none of them were very exciting secrets. I also thought that a movie with both Michael Caine (Dark Knight Rises) and Morgan Freeman (Oblivion) in it couldn’t possibly be all bad, but this one comes awfully close.
I went into this film expecting to be horribly grossed out and not at all amused. Turns out, I was about two-thirds right with that guess. The good news is, if you can survive the first ten minutes or so (blood, gore, and tremendous violence to the tune of Metallica’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls”!), then you can manage the rest of the movie without much trouble. There’s still an icky compound fracture close-up, and the occasional spewing of blood and guts, but nothing gets any worse than those first few minutes.
Little-known fact: When I was in college, I was the pizza-delivering Movie Critic Next Door. Well, okay, I was just a pizza delivery driver, not yet a movie critic of any sort. Yes, I was the only female driver, and yes, I worked for Domino’s, though the 30-minute guarantee was already a thing of the past. It was not, however, a guarantee of a free pizza; you actually got a coupon for $3 off your next order or something like that.