10 Terrible Movies That Tricked You Into Thinking They're Good
These movies played everybody like a damn fiddle.
At the end of the day, movies are all about manipulation, about flashing 24 frames per second in front of the viewer's eyes to give the impression of movement and, ultimately, storytelling.
Films are inherently an extremely sophisticated feat of tricking the brain, and there are countless other ways that filmmakers attempt to deceive viewers into feeling and thinking certain things.
At perhaps its most insidious level, this might even involve using a bevy of cinematic techniques to make audiences feel like they just watched a much better movie than they actually did.
Most obviously directors can ambush their viewers with an overabundance of style, because who among us doesn't love two hours' worth of pretty pictures?
But elsewhere a killer ensemble cast might be used to compensate for a fundamentally dreadful script, or the filmmaker might even abuse their own clout to make you think the movie's way smarter than it actually is.
Inspired by this recent Reddit thread on the subject, these 10 movies are all straight-up bad movies that employed some devious trickery to convince millions of people otherwise, for shame...
10. Now You See Me
It's quite fitting that Now You See Me, a movie about a team of magicians who pull off elaborate bank heists, is something of an elaborate magic trick itself.
Directed with undeniable slickness by Louis Leterrier, this heist-actioner is nevertheless as style-over-substance as cinema gets.
From the glossy cinematography to the snappy editing, this is a film that presents itself as two steps ahead of the audience at all times, no matter that it's actually a depressingly shallow piece of work lacking in even a single truly impressive or plausible on-screen magic trick.
There's an unintended meta layer to this movie, that the production is itself a smoke-and-mirrors act, attempting to compensate for a profoundly not-smart, regularly stupid script - punctuated by an inane twist ending - with a battery of neat visuals.
And it evidently worked - despite mixed reviews Now You See Me grossed over $350 million globally against a mere $75 million budget, leading to a sequel which bafflingly repeated a similar level of success.