Now You See Me 2

Magic works by presenting an audience with something so extraordinary, it defies our understanding of how it could have happened. It also plays on our innate desire -- most of us, anyway -- to believe in the fantastical, when it's presented to us. Much in the same way advertising works by entering a tacit agreement with you: It will offer us something that's too good to be true, we'll take pleasure in imagining a world where it could be thus.

Under those auspices, it's no enormous surprise that the first Now You See Me film, a twisty tale of magic acts, double feints and mysterious revelations, became a minor hit, and even less of one that Lionsgate would be so quick to release Now You See Me 2, a second installment of the continuing adventures of the Four Horsemen. The thing is, though, as much as it may drive us batty trying to figure out how a magic trick is performed, it's almost always a disappointment when you find out the cold, hard truth behind the stunt.

Our story takes off sometime after the end of the first film: With arch nemesis Thaddeus Bradley (Morgan Freeman) safely behind bars, and seething, after their last caper, the Four Horsemen -- controlling Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), hypnotist Merritt (Woody Harrelson), slick con man Jack (Dave Franco) and newest member, femme fatale Lula (Lizzy Caplan) -- have been laying low, following the orders of FBI mole and team leader Dylan (Mark Ruffalo). He, in turn, has been awaiting further word from the all-seeing Eye, a mysterious group of magicians who use their powers of deceit and illusion for the greater good. Dylan, now suspected as a double agent by a co-worker (David Warshofsky) and not quite trusted by his new boss (Sanaa Lathan), spends most of his time running interference for the Horsemen from the confines of the bureau.

When they finally get a new gig, exposing a tech magnate (Ben Lamb) during his latest massive product reveal, the Horsemen are instead tricked and find themselves transported suddenly to Macau. There they meet the weaselly Walter Mabry (Daniel Radcliffe), son of the villainous Arthur Tressler (Michael Caine), who gives them an assignment: Break into a massively secure high-tech laboratory and steal a newly designed computer chip that can supposedly break encryption on any device in the world.

This leads to a Mission: Impossible-style caper, with all sorts of sleight-of-hand and misdirection tricks, but after securing the chip, it becomes clear that Mabry has no intention of letting them get away from him and thus ensues an enormous cat-and-mouse game, ultimately leading to the Horsemen's latest international show on New Year's Eve in London, where everything eventually goes down.

As with all slick con movies, director Jon M. Chu and screenwriter Ed Solomon have no choice but to resolutely fool the audience into thinking one thing, only to reveal everything to be a massive -- and thoroughly unbelievable -- construction. In order to do this, the filmmakers utilize the standard cheat of "showing" us the protagonists' apparent distress and disharmony among one another, only to pull back the rubber mask at the end to show how the whole thing came together exactly as planned. In doing so, it naturally glosses over giant amounts of trifling details in order for everything to come off perfectly. Depending on your expectation and taste, this can either be happily ignored in order to better enjoy the fanciful silliness put before you, or it can make you gnash your teeth in frustration at the glib disregard for basic logic that keeps the story churning forward.

As far as the cast goes, Eisenberg is in his element, assuming himself the smartest person in any given room; Ruffalo brings what might be the film's only real pathos to his character, a man still haunted by the death of his magician father when he was a child; and newcomer Caplan smartly plays her grounded deadpan comedy as if standing in front of a studio audience.

Naturally, one doesn't go to such a film for exquisitely rendered character nuance, nor tightly bound, Tom Stoppard-like plotting. What we want to see is magicians using their abilities to pull fast ones over the rube villains and here, the film makes such liberal use of CGI as to render moot any question of how an illusion was accomplished which, if you think about it, is the main appeal of any magic show. Instead, we get a Furious-style action flick, with flying doves and flimsy card tricks in place of million-dollar supercars. The same rules of "family" apply -- with a group of nomads finding strength and connection with one another -- along with a liberal interpretation of the laws of physics.

The film takes pains to show how certain tricks were accomplished -- spoiler alert: Nearly all of them involve extremely convenient hypnosis -- but leaves other, more fantastical operations a fantasia mystery (not the smallest of which is how the Horsemen's ubiquitous headset microphones manage to reverberate throughout the entire city of London without any apparent speakers to amplify their voices). In a film in which nearly every character confronts another one by saying words to the effect of "let's just cut through the bullcrap," this film never actually bothers to do so. It's a bunch of hocus-pocus.

MovieStyle on 06/10/2016