Overview
One year after outwitting the FBI and winning the public’s adulation with their mind-bending spectacles, the Four Horsemen resurface only to find themselves face to face with a new enemy who enlists them to pull off their most dangerous heist yet.
I saw the first Now You See Me movie on a plane and was pleasantly suprised. Sure it was a bit silly but it was also just good fun and had a cast-with-chemistry and enough plot to keep you interested. A bit of a guilty pleasure if you will.
Now You See Me 2 brings more of everything – more action, more plot, more twists, and a couple new characters. Isla Fisher couldn’t reprise her role as Henley due to pregancy, so we meet Lula (Lizzy Caplan) as the new fourth horse(wo)man; and Daniel Radcliffe plays technology wizard (sorry…) Walter Mabry, the baddie planning to take over every computer on the planet.
The good thing is that the chemistry of the team still works so it is an easy and fun watch. And then there are more tricks and twists than you can shake a stick at. But maybe this is a bit too much of a good thing in this second instalment: being worried about the audience’s ability to buy into it all these (of course rather far-fetched) tricks and twists, the writers have chosen to take the audience completely by the hand: every single trick and every single twists gets dutifully explained somewhere in the movie. On the one hand this is satisfying as it makes the viewer buy into the cleverness of it all, yet on the other hand it makes you less engaged and you just watch for the action as the far-fetched plot points get fed to you.
It makes you want for a bit more Nolan-esque mystery like he delivered in The Prestige – whilst Now You See Me takes pride in the magician’s art of ‘the long game’ as yet another twist, The Prestige manages to make the entire plot about it.
In the end there is just a bit too much shallow trickery (at various levels) going on to captivate. It’s still an easy watch, but where the first movie was a guilty pleasure, this second one is guilty of less pleasure. I hope that the 3rd instalment of this franchise (currently in development) will find its way to a simpler, more engaging plot.
5/10.
