Trick: The Movie

At first I've heard only rumors about this movie, and when I heard that this was mystery-comedy about a magician doing detective work, I knew I had to see it. I finally ordered online a copy of this movie, and because this movie seemed to be something I heard about only in rumors, I had very high expectations. However, I expected a life-changing movie, and I didn't feel this movie was one of them.

In a nutshell, the movie is about an amateur magician, who has a talent for figuring out tricks from just one sighting, who uses her tricks to convince a superstitious village that she is the Goddess. However, where this movie really gets interesting is when there are already other magicians trying to deceive the village, which throws the main character into direct competition with the others to determine who is the true God or Goddess. Just as the title says, this movie is loaded with tricks. It is a lot of fun playing along with the movie in trying to figure out how these different magicians do their tricks, and each trick exposed is more clever than the last. However, the movie falls short in story telling. Because this was based on a ten-episode Japanese TV drama, the movie tries to compress a lot of information into a short time frame, so having not seen the drama, the movie feels crammed and hard to follow.

Nonetheless, I feel this movie is fun and enjoyable overall, but it did not at all meet my extremely high expectations. Despite the uneven pacing of the story, I was thoroughly satisfied with the cleverness of each of the tricks in this movie and feel the movie is worth watching at least once.