So, it would have been easy to project an image of the horsemen running across the stage before becoming cash, while the real Horsemen slip under the stage and make their way undetected to the darkened rooftop nearby. Before the Horsemen turn into money, they are standing on a stage that is overly-brightly lit and far away from the audience. Since the start of the story, we have seen the "Eye" make heavy use of holographic technology. The in-movie solution for the illusion is pretty obvious. "He was not happy with me." Despite the hardships, the duo managed to pull off one of the most imaginative fight scenes in recent memory.Īt the risk of stating the obvious, we know immediately that the Horsemen did not actually turn into money. Perhaps the most renowned card-thrower was the late magician/movie supporting star Ricky Jay, who demonstrated his amazing skill time and time again, and was in the Guinness Book of World Records for throwing a card 190 feet at 90 miles per hour - plenty fast enough to draw blood in an opponent.Īs for Franco, he supposedly got so good at throwing cards that he actually nicked Ruffalo a few times while filming their fight sequence. "I cut up Mark Ruffalo's face real good," the actor admitted in a 2013 MTV interview. "Dave can throw cards with incredible speed and accuracy across a sound stage," David Kwong told EW in 2013. "We set up targets for him in the production office, and he would knock them down and slice through a banana." It can be hard to believe that anyone could throw an ordinary playing card like a shuriken hard enough to hurt someone. For instance, in Merritt's first scene, he "senses" a man is having an affair by throwing out calculated guesses and modifying those guesses based on the man's guilty body language. Once the other person believes you know more than you do, they might inadvertently share information that is actually secret while being convinced you knew the secret all along thanks to your "psychic" abilities. The other tactic is "hot reading," where you secretly dig up information regarding the other person beforehand, and impart that information to the person to make them think you know more than you actually do. to arrive at various conclusions about their personal life. The two most famous tactics mentalists use are "cold reading," where you observe a person's dress, body language, emotional state etc. In reality, a mentalist can make use of a variety of observation and conversation techniques to extract information from a person without directly asking them. In truth, Merritt's talents are an exaggerated version of real-world mentalists.