Somehow Even Less Magical

The way the first Now You See Me film ended, we really didn’t need a sequel. The Four Horsemen had pulled off their massive heist scheme. The ringleader, FBI Agent Dylan Rhodes, had been revealed, and he’d welcomed the four magicians into The Eye, the secret magicians organization they’d been trying to get into all along. For all respects, what little plot there was in the film (which really didn’t delve much into story or substance) was tied up, and we could all move on to some other, better production.

But Now You See Me made a surprising amount of money. On a budget of $75 Mil, it made $351.7 Mil. For the price, that’s good value. As such the production companies, Summit Entertainment and K/O Paper Products, along with distributor Lionsgate, pushed a sequel into production. But how do you make a sequel to a film that barely had any story and, of those threads, had already tied up everything it could? Well, you throw in more family members to existing characters and reshuffle the whole mess again.

Now You See Me 2 (which was supposed to be called Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, but that title was, for some reason, reserved for the third film) very much feels like a second, massive comic book crossover for this whole magicians universe that, for some reason, these two films have been building. Old enemies come out of the wood work. New enemies arise. Allies become enemies and enemies become allies, all so that a massive, world-ending threat can be neutralized. It’s not creative about it, and it’s certainly not that smart at all, but Now You See Me 2 doesn’t really care about that. It just wants to tell another plot-light story about magicians you barely care about, all so it can leech more money from your wallets. And I suppose it does just that.

We catch up with the three of the Four Horsemen – Jesse Eisenberg's J. Daniel Atlas, Woody Harrelson as Merritt McKinney, and Dave Franco's Jack Wilder – eighteen months after their last adventure. They were accepted into The Eye, they thought, but what that really seemed to mean was that they had to stay in hiding, waiting for Dylan Rhodes (Mark Ruffalo) to tell them what to do next. It’s been a long eighteen months as they try, and fail, to learn to work together as a team, and their nerves are frayed.

Things kick into gear, though, when a new fourth member is added to their team: illusionist and escape artist Lula May (Lizzy Caplan, brought in to replace Isla Fisher, who was pregnant at the time). This is when Dylan tells them their next mission: to take over the launch show for the new Octa Phone all because Octa is selling people’s data, secretly, to the highest bidder. But the show doesn’t go as planned, with someone else hacking their magic act, and suddenly the Four Horsemen have to flee from the FBI sent to raid the show. They hit their escape tunnel, only to wake up in Macau, having fallen into a trap set by reclusive tech tycoon Walter Mabry (Daniel Radcliffe). Now he is demanding their assistance in stealing some tech, and they’ll have to comply or he’ll have them killed.

The first act of Now You See Me 2 is probably where the film is at its best. It focuses mostly on the Four Horsemen, letting us see the strain of waiting around while also introducing Lulu as their new member. It’s tight, it’s well organized, and it actually does some work for all the characters, something this film desperately needed. It also lets Caplan shine as the new member, giving her some good lines and letting the comedienne do her thing, stealing scenes out from under the other players.

It’s in the second act that things start to get a little out of control. The introduction of Daniel Radcliffe’s Mabry does give us a villain, but he’s not a very well defined villain. He wants a McGuffin, the magicians have to steal a McGuffin, and that’s really all there is for character or story development. He’s well played by Radcliffe, so there’s fun to be had from the actor, but that all there is to yet another underwritten, and not very interesting, villain. And that ignores all the extra new and returning like Morgan Freeman's Thaddeus Bradley, here to act as a foil to Rhodes, and Merritt McKinney's twin brother, Chase (also played by Harrelson), so he can act as a foil to Merritt. None of these people are really necessary, and they only serve to draw more attention from the characters and story that need help.

And then it’s in the third act where things really fall apart. This is where things become really comic book-y, with a new, secret villain from the magicians’ past getting reintroduced, while The Eye itself is also retconned and reinvented. Pasts are changed, new alliances are formed, and it feels like the film strains as it tries to put a twist on a twist on a twist. There’s no logic to the story by this point, just the film saying, “so you think you know what was going on, but here’s how it really happened.” The only time a film pulled that off was Clue, and it earned its silliness and twisty ending(s). Now You See Me 2 does not.

To be clear, the fault in this film does not come from the actors. No matter who they’re playing, the actors in the movie are all doing their best to elevate the material. It’s pretty clear everyone involved in the film had a good time, and they were enjoying getting to hang around, do some silly performances, all while getting to party in Macau on the company dime. The reason the film works at all is because it is packed with charismatic performers playing to the material and enjoying themselves as they do it.

And the film does look great. Jon M. Chu was brought in to direct this second film, and he does a solid job both in grounding the locations of the film while also making every part of it look slick and interesting. The film has a different vibe from the first movie, less packed with movie magic in every frame, reflecting the fact that the Horsemen have gotten themselves caught in a trap and aren’t in control of every second of their performance. Chu’s eye works well here, it’s just that it’s wasted on a script that doesn’t deserve his skill.

With that said, the film does rely on CGI even more than the first movie. There are some tricks the magicians perform, especially an elaborate card trick heist, that clearly only works in a movie and wouldn’t function in real life. The end sequence of magic tricks as well are all CGI and completely fake, and it breaks the movie’s built-in illusion when you know that nothing these magicians are doing is real. The production team didn’t care about making proper illusions; they were here to make movie magic and damn the reality of it all.

It all leads to a confusing mess of a film that just doesn’t work. And that’s not just my opinion as audiences felt the same way. The movie cost more to make (upwards of $120 Mil) and it made less at the Box Office than the first film ($334.9 Mil during its run). While audiences weren’t completely tired of the Now You See Me schtick, they also weren’t increasingly entranced with it, either. This was an interactive copy of a messy first film, and people either came because they liked the first movie, or stayed away because they hadn’t.

There’s nothing new or interesting to Now You See Me 2, it’s just more of the same messy storytelling paired with underdeveloped characters and CGI that cheats all the tricks. I want to say there’s some core idea here that could still work, especially if the films were built more like a cinematic universe and less like single, massive crossover event films, but that’s not how these films were made. They’re just irritating, and the fact that, for some reason, the series is still going after the mess of Now You See Me 2 baffles my mind.