Grade: C+

Apparently an attempt to fashion a cooler, hipper version of “Star Wars” in advance of Disney’s restart of that Lucas franchise (it might be mistaken for the earlier adventures of Han Solo, without even an Obi-wan figure to lend it a touch of gravitas), Marvel’s latest superhero behemoth “Guardians of the Galaxy” is one of those movies that should actually be labeled as FFO—“For Fanboys Only”—except that being an efficiently made product of the Marvel Factory’s assembly line operation, its blend of explosive action and juvenile humor will probably appeal to a far wider part of today’s filmgoing public. It’s a completely vacuous reiteration of the “saving the universe” plot common to all these pictures, but audiences will no doubt eat up its non-stop mixture of CGI wizardry and puerile gags.

Based not on the original comic-book series of the late sixties and early seventies but the 2008 reboot, “Guardians” brings together a bunch of misfits—preening, jokey humanoid outlaw Peter Quill, aka “Starlord” (Chris Pratt); green-toned alien femme fatale Gamora (Zoe Saldana); burly, tattooed giant Drax (Dave Bautista); cynical, wise-cracking genetically modified raccoon Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper); and anthropomorphic tree Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel)—to take on a powerful villain called Ronan (Lee Pace), who’s intent on destroying the planet Xandar, which is presided over by a female leader (Glenn Close).

The MacGuffin of the plot is an orb with mysterious destructive power. After a brief prologue in which we see the young Quill (Wyatt Oleff) witness the death of his mother and get abducted by an alien spaceship, we find him grown and entering a cave to secure the orb for his boss, the blue-tinted Ravager (i.e., outlaw) leader Yondu (Michael Rooker). After a battle with Ronan’s henchman Korath (Djimon Hounsou), Quill escapes. But he has no intention of handing over the orb to Yondu; he takes it to Xandar intending to fence it himself. That’s where he meets Gamora, Rocket and Groot. She wants to steal the orb; they’re bounty hunters who want to snatch Quill. Their confrontation leads them all to be arrested and sent to prison, where they encounter Drax, who has a personal grudge against Ronan and joins with them in escaping. Another encounter with Ronan, Korath and Gamora’s stepsister Nebula (Karen Gillan) puts them all in jeopardy, but eventually they—along with Yondu’s fleet—make their way to Xandar, where they mount a joint stand with the Xandarian defenders against Ronan, who by now has mastered the power of the orb.

This threadbare plot is nothing more than an excuse for a chain of splashy battle scenes, interrupted by lots of jocular bickering among the oddball crew. Much of the latter is provided by Cooper’s Rocket, who bad-mouths everybody but his buddy Groot (the tone of whose sole words he’s able to reinterpret), and especially Pratt’s Quill, a dude who takes little seriously and constantly grooves to the mix tape of ’70s pop tunes that’s the only link he possesses to his mother (as well as serving to score many of the movie’s set-pieces). There are points at which the picture tries for sentiment or poignancy—the prologue, for example, but also a few scenes in which characters are put in jeopardy or are apparently killed—but none of them has any real depth. And the material featuring Ronan and his ally Thanos (voiced by an uncredited Josh Brolin) is all too reminiscent of “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe,” with the duo coming across like deep-voiced Skeletor wannabes.

The most crowd-pleasing “characters” are likely to be Rocket and Groot, who are marvels of CGI imaging and whom Cooper and Diesel voice with surprising point. Pratt seems to be doing a sort of homage to Captain Mal Reynolds of “Serenity,” which perhaps explains Nathan Fillion’s walk-on in the prison sequence. Saldana exhibits her customary athleticism but otherwise serves mostly as eye candy, and as Drax Bautista shows the sort of talent characteristic of most ex-wrestlers: he’s a hulking presence, and delivers his lines, laden with elevated vocabulary as a jocular counterpoint to his bulging physique, in a monotonous growl. But that’s what the part requires. Close suffers from the same problem that afflicted Natalie Portman in the second “Star Wars” trilogy—she’s too concerned with trying to keep her unsightly hairdo in place to act, except in the most generalized fashion. But John C. Reilly is able to add a few wry touches to his turn as a Xandar policeman and the scowling Rooker savors Yondu’s nastiness, both overshadowing Benicio Del Toro’s brief turn as a distinctly weird “collector” of unusual artifacts.

“Guardians” represents a very different thing from James Gunn’s previous movie, “Super,” which tried—even if unsuccessfully—to investigate the dark side of fanboydom and the damage it can lead to. By contrast this is a jokey, lighthearted, and ultimately inconsequential riff about another guy determined to be a famous hero. It’s been elaborately produced—though the settings devised by the effects team have a comic-book look, one can hardly fault the production design of Charles Wood or Ben Davis’ cinematography—and the visual effects, especially those involving Rocket and Groot, are smoothly integrated into the live-action material. What original music there is, once you factor in the pop tunes, is provided in pretty standard fashion by Tyler Bates, and one can be thankful to editors (Craig Wood, Fred Raskin and Hughes Winborne for the fact that for a Marvel superhero movie, this one comes in at a relatively trim two hours (even less if you skip the final credits).

The very empty-headedness of “Guardians of the Galaxy” will probably insure its enormous success, since many in the audience will be able to identify with it.

Grade: C+

Once upon a time heist movies were about actual human beings pulling off ingenious capers that were explained to the audience in intelligible terms. Even at their most farfetched, the best of them required an inner logic that made them satisfying diversions. Nowadays, however, special effects are the key, and the human element goes pretty much out the window. That’s certainly the case with “Now You See Me,” a fast-moving puzzler that, on a minute to minute basis, is moderately engaging but by the close has become a rather heavy-handed bit of hokum with lots of plot holes left unexplained.

The realm of big-money Vegas magic shows is the milieu the script employs. Four sleight-of-hand artists—arrogant industry staple J. Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), sarcastic mentalist Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson), shapely escape artist Henley Reeves (Isla Fisher) and street practitioner Jack Wilder (Dave Franco)—are recruited by a mysterious mastermind to pull off a series of high-profile acts as a team. Before you can say hocus pocus, they’re bankrolled by international insurance mogul Arthur Tressler (Michael Caine), and after the first show results in the theft of a bundle of Euros from a Paris bank, FBI Agent Dylan Rhodes (Mark Ruffalo) is assigned to crack the case, partnered by pretty Interpol representative Alma Dray (Melanie Laurent). For inside information on the tricks of the trade they turn to professional magic debunker Thaddeus Bradley (Morgan Freeman), who’s made a career of revealing how magicians do what they do to the general public—and has ruined some of them in the process.

But Rhodes still finds himself in over his head, unable to prevent further gambits that result in massive unauthorized bank transfers and the theft of a huge safe from a supposedly secure warehouse. Everything comes to a head in New York City, where the final confrontation involves a fight in an apartment building, a car chase that ends in flames on a bridge, an outdoor rooftop performance attended by thousands of viewers, and a twist that not only reveals the identity of the mastermind behind everything but the motivation as well.

On the most basic terms, the mazelike scenario of “Now You See Me” is a pleasantly convoluted contraption that’s fair enough in what it ladles out about the “why” of what’s happening (indeed, it would take a pretty dense viewer not to know well in advance the motive at work here), but keeps the precise “who” in reserve to the last reel, although the old mystery-story staple of always assuming the least likely person to be the perpetrator remains a safe bet here. But the “how” of each step along the way isn’t always covered satisfactorily. To be sure, Bradley offers blow-by-blow explanations for some of the shenanigans (Freeman’s flashback recitations are reminiscent of the ones George Peppard offered in every episode of the old “Banacek” television series), and they’re nicely edited by Robert Leighton and Vincent Tabaillon. But many other feats are left unexplained (papered over by “magic” effects), and when you come to the end—which also involves some sort of secret association of magicians that’s existed for centuries—the overall scheme, based on coincidence after coincidence and a gargantuan amount of implausibility (not least about the mastermind’s identity), seems in retrospect a very incredible invention indeed.

On the plus side, though the characters are basically caricatures, the cast is agreeable, with Harrelson having a field day as the snide mentalist, Eisenberg replaying his “Social Network” persona to good effect, and Fisher providing nifty eye-candy. Franco gets the short end of the stick among the Four Horsemen, as they’re called, but he handles what the script provides adequately enough. Freeman offers his patented brand of calm smugness, but Caine is wasted in a stock role that frankly doesn’t make much sense—why would such a tycoon bankroll a magic act? Ruffalo appears to be radically overdoing things through much of the running-time as the overexcited FBI man, but there’s a method to his apparent madness, and Laurent is likable romantic interest for him.

Director Louis Leterrier helps matters by staging it all at a lightning pace, in obvious hope that pushing rapidly ahead will keep viewers from thinking too closely about unlikely plot developments. Technically the picture is first-rate, with Michael Amundsen and Larry Fong’s widescreen cinematography giving the images a lush, colorful look and Peter Wenham’s production design effectively elaborate, especially in the highly theatrical scenes of the quartet in performance, where the snazzy lighting effects and whiplash camerawork fulfill their purpose. Brian Tyler’s music score is also appropriately flashy.

“Now You See Me” constantly indulges in the misdirection that Bradley repeatedly refers to as the mainstay of the magician’s art, and as Eisenberg’s Atlas is accustomed to say of any trick, if you look at it too closely you’ll miss the forest for the trees. But though the forest, when it’s revealed at the close, doesn’t really amount to much, the trees afford occasional moments of pleasure along the way.