Now You See Me 2

Recommendation

I will just come out and say, I don’t recommend this movie. I can’t recommend it if you haven’t seen the first one because the plot relies heavily on the events from the previous film, but at the same time, I wouldn’t recommend this to people who like the first film because it fails to recreate the style that made that movie enjoyable.

The film does have entertaining magic sequences, and some of the heist elements are interesting, but the story doesn’t demand magic in the way the first movie did. The setups feel forced and the action is disconnected from the characters. On the whole I would label this slightly don’t recommend (hence the 2).

Thoughts

Spoilers for the first and second films…

Magic for No Reason

One of the major differences between this film and the original is that it has magic performances thrown in for seemingly no reason. In the original, magic was used for a few specific reasons on top of it simply being entertaining for a viewing audience.

The film uses magic to establish each character. We learn about their background and abilities through an entertaining magical performance at the beginning, and each is in a natural setting where it makes sense for them to be performing. We learn that Atlas is a famous and arrogant traditional magician, Henley is a nonconventional but talented stage performer, McKinney is a down on his luck mentalist using his abilities to scam tourists, and Jack Wilder is essentially a nobody using his skills to rob people.

In the first film, the magic is used in a practical way to execute the heist. The Horsemen’s live show is a vehicle for them to pull off each phase of the heist. The filmmakers can slip in magic tricks to entertain the audience and move the story forward at the same time. The film settles into a fun pattern of dazzling the audience with tricks, and then showing how that progresses the story by explaining the magic with the antagonist, Thaddeus Bradley.

In contrast, the second movie puts in magic for no reason. The Henley replacement character is introduced in a scene where she has broken into Atlas’s house. She too is introduced doing magic, but the only person there is Atlas so it feels unnatural. It’s unclear why she’d be doing it and it segues into a scene where Atlas repeatedly tries to tie her up with ropes and she continually escapes. It just feels like a contrived set up to show off the tricks.

The biggest offender is the scene in the vault when they steal the chip and place it on a playing card. Each character uses sleight of hand to manipulate the card away from the people searching them. However, after the first person succeeds in evading suspicion there is no reason to continually hand the card off to each person in the room. Every time one of them is in the clear they take a huge risk and throw the card over to someone else.

Not all of the magic in the movie is unnecessary, but there’s enough of it that it becomes distracting. There is also a lot of random stuff that I wouldn’t classify as magic that sneaks in. At one point a character pretends to have their arm cut off and throws a fake arm across the room. It’s played for a joke, but thinking about it for a moment it seems like it would have at least raised an alarm.

Explaining the Magic in the Wrong Way

The first movie explains how all of the magic works for the audience through Thaddeus Bradley. They are able to use this character as the bad guy to frame what he is doing as wrong while still being able to explain the magic to show how skillful the horsemen really are.

In this film, there is a similar scene at the end where the big reveal is that they were never really on a plane to begin with, but there is no Thaddeus character to explain how the trick came together. Instead the horsemen themselves explain to the whole world how they do the trick. This is so counter to how the characters should behave that it is borderline jarring. The magicians are the last people in the world who should be explaining their trick.

Undermining the Characters

Another problem I had with this film is that the script is constantly undermining the characters. In the first movie, each character is established as one of the best magicians alive and we are shown their skills. In this movie, characters are repeatedly outsmarted and made fools of in service of the plot. Those decisions ultimately change our impression of the characters in a negative way, and as a result the overall the tone of the movie is different from the original.

McKinney is a major reason their initial plan fails. He is hypnotized by his brother and gives away their plan. Hypnotizing the hypnotist character makes him look like he’s absolutely awful at his job. Atlas is also tricked into thinking he’s talking to The Eye which seriously undermines his credibility as being a leader. They’re meant to be one step ahead of everyone, but in this movie they’re constantly behind.

Jack Wilder’s character is maybe the only one they don’t actively deprecate, but the framing of his character lowers his status. In the first one, he’s sort of a wild card roguish character that comes in handy when the other members of the team don’t expect it. He is never portrayed as lacking in skill: he is on stage performing with the rest of them throughout the film. In this film, he has become a mentalist protege and his skills that were interesting in the first one get put on the shelf. He still throws cards at people constantly, but his lock picking is relegated to one scene where he wiggles the chip out of the computer. Otherwise he just tried to use mentalism and mostly fails.

Dylan Rhodes (Mark Ruffalo) also has a complete 180 on his character. In the previous one he is the mastermind, but this time he doesn’t know what’s going on. Ultimately, his whole life was a lie and everything that happened in the first movie is completely devalued.

Devaluing the Original

In the service of plot twists, this movie basically destroys everything set up in the original film. The main twist of the film is that Thaddeus Bradley was secretly an important member of The Eye and someone who originally worked with Dylan Rhodes’ father. This completely ruins the point of the first movie. Everything they did was to enact revenge on the people that had wronged Shrike. Also if Thaddeus is a major member of The Eye and Dylan doesn’t know that, then Dylan’s position in The Eye is seriously undermined.

Every time something is revealed it tends to have an initial shock value and then tons of problems if you consider the ramifications. There’s a random character who is in charge of the vault that was holding the computer chip. He is shown to be part of The Eye in a throwaway scene towards the end, but this just raises a bunch of questions. If The Eye already had someone on the inside the vault there must have been an easier way to steal the chip.

The Title

This is just a random other thought I’ve had about this movie since it came out. Calling it Now You See Me 2 may have made sense from a marketing perspective, but it blows my mind that you wouldn’t call the sequel Now You Don’t. I know that naming wouldn’t make much sense in the context of the film, but neither did Now You See Me apart from being related to magic. Now You Don’t is still equally related to magic and is the obvious continuation of the phrase.

Maybe they were just being optimistic and realized that by choosing Now You Don’t it would locked them into just 2 movies. If you were to make a third movie you’d have to come up with something totally unrelated. Still, Now You Don’t just seems superior in every way to Now You See Me 2