'See Me 2' suffers from bad case of sequel deja view
"Now You See Me 2" suffers from the same problem as its slick 2013 original high-tech Robin Hood adventure:
Even after the heroes explain their most elaborate and complex tricks, you still need a hit of Advil to combat the confusion and headaches the explanations inspire.
How did the good guys finance, construct and test all their amazing technical props and sets mere minutes before they needed to use them?
How many hypnotists can be allowed in a single movie? So many people run around hypnotizing each other that I'm not sure if I nodded off from boredom or one of their trances actually worked and I forgot what happened.
This unlikely sequel recycles (mostly) the same cast and similar plot of Louis Leterrier's first movie about a Las Vegas magician quartet - The Four Horsemen - revealing unethical tricks of the corporate trade while entertaining global fans with fantastic acts of derring-do-it.
Isla Fisher's Henley Reeves pulls off the movie's first disappearing act. She drops out of the cast.
Lizzy Caplan's tart and non-crumbling cookie Lula joins the reassembled Horsemen - J. Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson) and Jack Wilder (Dave Franco).
(Uh, shouldn't they really be "The Four Horsepersons"?)
"Now You See Me 2" opens with jailed Thaddeus Bradley (Morgan Freeman) ominously threatening to give the Horsemen "everything you deserve." The good guys sent the crooked magic debunker up the river three years ago.
The Horsemen receive a new assignment from their boss, Mark Ruffalo's FBI agent Dylan Rhodes, on orders from a mysterious overseer of justice called The Eye.
With two FBI colleagues (Sanaa Lathan, David Warshofsky) on the verge of discovering Rhodes' betrayal, the Horsemen race to expose a corporate scheme to invade the world's privacy.
The Horsemen almost get captured during a comeback Vegas presentation, but they escape by jumping down a trash chute - and emerging in Macau, China.
How did that happen?
That becomes the most asked question in this sequel, under the direction of Jon M. Chu, who wisely refuses to ground the film's preposterously ridiculous set pieces with any degree of realism. (An absurd, complex handoff of a playing card at a security checkpoint almost becomes a digitally enhanced Charlie Chaplin routine.)
A bearded Daniel Radcliffe has great fun with his villainous role as Walter, the James Bondish megalomaniacal mastermind behind a plot of global tech domination.
Harrelson performs a magic act of sorts by playing his identical twin brother, a saucy malcontent with the whitest teeth in the universe.
"Now You See Me 2" peddles amusing playful nonsense, but it falls victim to its own ex-machina trickery.
No matter how bad things look, we know nothing terrible will happen to the Horsemen because we've been conditioned to expect some impossible twist - explained much later - to save them.
It's like a reverse of the old "Mission: Impossible" TV series in which we see how the elaborate traps get set before the con begins, a more dramatic premise because we can see the stakes and mistakes involved in the hoax as it goes.
If you like this movie, you will probably like "Now You See Me 3." Chu has already been contracted to direct. Call it "Now You See Me Again, and Again."
“Now You See Me 2”
★ ★
Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Mark Ruffalo, Lizzy Caplan, Dave Franco, Woody Harrelson, Daniel Radcliffe
Directed by: Jon M. Chu
Other: Rated PG-13 for language, violence. 115 minutes