Jon M. Chu | 129 mins | streaming (HD) | 2.35:1 | USA & France* / English, Mandarin & Cantonese | 12 / PG-13
Con thrillers are much like magic tricks: they set you up to expect one thing, then reveal something else was going on all along. The major difference is that, unlike most magic tricks, con thrillers eventually show you how it was done. So whoever came up with the idea of combining those two things into a movie where magicians use their skills to pull off elaborate heists was practically a genius in my book — what a magnificent marriage of ideas! Unfortunately, the resulting films — Now You See Me and this sequel — aren’t much good at magic, routinely substituting CGI for the tricks, and they’re not great at cons either, substituting a headlong rush and a barrage of twists for a plot that hangs together. And that’s why these films are fundamentally empty: they don’t understand that the impressiveness of both magic and reveal-based narratives lies in doing it for real, not in pretending to do it.
Nonetheless, I quite enjoyed the first movie — in spite of its flaws, it was a daft bit of fun. The sequel (which misses a trick from the off by not being titled Now You Don’t) is too stupid to even manage that level of entertainment, instead devolving into a morass of nonsensicality. It’s not even that its plot has zero credibility as a plausible story — it’s the very way it’s put together as a film. Scenes feel disconnected from one another. Bits within them seem to have been snipped out. Sequences of varying scales seem to have been created from the notion of “what if we had a scene like this?” with no thought given to if it fits in the film, or even if it makes sense within itself. I’m left wondering if the movie had to be heavily trimmed for time; or did it never make any sense and this is the best they could stitch together?
Some spectacle-driven movies can drift by without too much sense, but a con movie — where a major component is the explanation — is not one of them. Indeed, Now You See Me 2 endeavours to make sense. It tells you there was a twist; a clever plan; that someone pulled the wool over someone else’s eyes. Sometimes it does even pretend to explain how they supposedly achieved that… but it doesn’t actually explain it. It tries to just sweep you along in a whirlwind of “surprise!” moments. That might be fine if you don’t care how it hangs together, but if you pause to consider who knew what when, and who plotted what and how… well, the film doesn’t want to give you a chance to think about any of that. That just contributes to my belief that, if you did stop and try to piece it all together, you’d discover it doesn’t actually make sense.
A few minor positives come from the new cast members. Lizzy Caplan is really good, a funny addition to the team, and Daniel Radcliffe entertains as the smiling villain, although thanks to the flurry of reveals he doesn’t get as much screen time as he deserves. Actors like Jesse Eisenberg, Mark Ruffalo, Morgan Freeman, and Michael Caine feel like they’re phoning it in for a paycheque. Well, sometimes a movie’s worth doing if it, say, pays for a nice house, eh Michael?
Watching it doesn’t bring any such benefits, though, so don’t bother.
* I had this down as a USA/UK/China/Canada co-production. IMDb now says USA/France. Other places say just USA. One of the main production companies is from Hong Kong, according to IMDb. So who the hell knows? ^
After suffering the first one, life’s far too short to waste on a second one.
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Wise. But someone must like them — apparently there’s both a third and a spin-off in the works.
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What? More of them? The first was bloody awful. It’s as if film is culturally bereft these days, it’s bad enough 2049 flopping at the box office, without garbage movies like these being financially rewarding enough to keep sequels going. All this is getting bad for my blood pressure, LOL.
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I believe the spin-off is to be made/set in China, so maybe they’re just big hits over there — a bit like how Warcraft earnt absolutely shedloads there and almost nothing anywhere else (certainly, that doesn’t seem to be getting a sequel).
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Explains a lot- the Chinese are obviously waging a cultural war on the Western world by encouraging terrible films to be made hence intellectually damaging us and our culture. The movies of the past ten years all make perfect sense now.
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Sounds like a plot for Team America 2…
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God. I didn’t know about a spinoff. I figured there’d be a third though.
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Well said. I hated this film. With pretty much every fiber of my being.
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I think what annoys me most is I really like the concept — magicians using their skills to perform heists — but no one’s ever going to be able to do it properly now.
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Yeah man. The use of cgi was a “perfect” (read: convenient) excuse for the filmmakers to just do whatever they wanted. I loved the ideas they were going for but when you can just digitally manipulate everything the whole enterprise loses credibility. The first was fun, the second beyond silly.
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Christ, it’s actually worse than the original turd?
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IMO by a magnitude of ten
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