The sequel to 2013’s surprise hit Now You See Me unsurprisingly fails to deliver, as its purpose is nothing more than to make the first film’s surprising success scaleable.
There are few things more enjoyable in life than an unexpected win. A throwaway quip on Twitter being retweeted by someone you greatly admire, an improvised presentation at work going down well with your boss, a first attempt at a magic trick stunning the audience.
The problem with building on surprising success is that you’re building on foundations you weren’t planning on returning to, and unfortunately that is painfully evident in Now You See Me 2. Sometimes you should just take the win and move on. But that’s not how the film industry works.
When a film with a budget of $75 million returns nearly quintuple that at the box office – as the first Now You See Me did in 2013 – you don’t take the win and move on, you call your lawyer and tell the actors to sign up for at least two more sequels.
However, for the first 40 minutes or so, Now You See Me 2’s foundations hold up. In fact, it’s actually an enjoyable magic-infused heist caper that continues in the same vein as the first film. This is predominantly down to the underrated but comedically brilliant Lizzy Kaplan as new character, Lulu. Kaplan replaces Isla Fisher as the female Fourth Horseman due to Fisher’s being pregnant at the time of filming (impromptu Hollywood franchises wait for nobody!) It’s a clunky introduction, and foreshadows later terrible attempts at cultivating some franchise mythology that was never meant to be. However, Kaplan more than holds her own among a sadly overwhelming male cast.
The Four Horsemen still do the bidding of the mysterious Eye, a hilarious cross between the Illuminati, the Magic Circle and Occupy Wall Street. This time, their target is a greedy tech billionaire who wants to use his technology to spy on people and tinker with the markets. Just as we are about to witness the Four Horsemen ride off into the sunset after another successful magical takedown, things go wrong and we’re introduced to the film’s big bad: Daniel Radcliffe – who plays a different greedy tech billionaire. Diverse Machiavellian villains with complex motivations this film has not.
Radcliffe’s tech billionaire says the Horsemen must steal a computer chip the size of a playing card from the tech billionaire we saw at the beginning of the film (but literally never again). This leads to undoubtedly the single best scene in the whole film, where magic tricks and the heist genre are fused together in a way reminiscent of the Fast & Furious franchise, which has perfected the heist-using-a-particular-set-of-skills genre.
Unfortunately during the rest of the film, its foundations crumble. The first 40 minutes were good because they weren’t littered with too many references to the first film or its mythology. The plot was straightforward and enjoyable and Radcliffe’s villain was delightfully irreverent.
All of a sudden characters like Michael Caine’s Tressler return with a tenuous connection to the sequel’s plot and the relationship between Mark Ruffalo’s Dylan Shrike and Morgan Freeman’s Thaddeus – which was a major resolved plot point in the first film – becomes rewritten. This particularly leaves a bad taste because it was so painfully forced to accommodate the now quickly evolving franchise.
The film’s sudden preoccupation with fleshing out the NYSM mythology and making it appear as if it’s all part of a well-thought out plan completely throws the film off course.
The plot becomes too convoluted, the Macguffin is forgotten, Radcliffe’s character goes from irreverent and potentially interesting to psychopathic but bland. As the film approaches the end, it regains some of the earlier momentum that made the first film successful, but unfortunately by that point, it’s too late. The audience is lost and the incessant shots of thousands of Four Horsemen fans in paroxysms of enjoyment grate.
Upon reflection, one can’t help but treat this film as a tactical gambit for the studio, a retrospective paintbrush used to somehow make the first film’s plot scaleable so it could bear the ensuing sequels. The end result is a gallimaufry of story changes and compromises.
Only the next film can confirm whether the risk paid off.
Check out the rest of the latest cinema releases in our new movie reviews section, including the equally unwanted sequel Independence Day: Resurgence.
