Now You See Me 2

Rube Gold­berg is cel­e­brat­ed for his comics fea­tur­ing over-engi­neered con­trap­tions made to per­form sim­ple tasks. Take for exam­ple the ​“Self-Oper­at­ing Nap­kin”, which is acti­vat­ed when the user rais­es a spoon and sets off a chain reac­tion, involv­ing a hun­gry par­rot, an alarm clock, and a fire­crack­er, that in the end only brings a nap­kin to the user’s mouth. Now You See Me 2, direc­tor Jon M Chu’s fol­low-up to Louis Leterrier’s mediocre 2013 heist film, con­tains a thin­ly-veiled Gold­berg ref­er­ence, but the film as a whole oper­ates like one of the cartoonist’s hap­haz­ard inventions.

After a year in hid­ing, the Four Horse­men – a group of sar­cas­tic illu­sion­ists who use their tal­ents to expose insti­tu­tion­al cor­rup­tion – are forced by devi­ous tech-prodi­gy Wal­ter Mabry (Daniel Rad­cliffe) to steal a data-min­ing chip. This chip is appar­ent­ly a ​“key to every com­put­er sys­tem on the plan­et.” Not that this real­ly mat­ters, but it sounds seri­ous. Mean­while, Four Horse­men co-con­spir­a­tor and FBI agent Dylan Rhodes (Mark Ruf­fa­lo) plots revenge against Thad­deus Bradley (Mor­gan Free­man), whom he blames for the death of his magi­cian father.

The prob­lem with Now You See Me 2 is that it tries too hard to be seri­ous. Sequels, after all, are expect­ed to be big­ger, bold­er and more dra­mat­ic than the orig­i­nal. And this is unfor­tu­nate, because the film is real­ly quite good when it embraces the the­atri­cal­i­ty and humour inher­ent to stage mag­ic. In one stand­out sequence, inces­sant­ly brood­ing Horse­men mem­ber Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisen­berg) sheds mul­ti­ple dis­guis­es in rapid suc­ces­sion. It’s a sort of slap­stick strip tease – faux col­lars fall away one after the oth­er like a set of Russ­ian nest­ing dolls. Like a good mag­ic trick, it’s impos­si­ble not to smile and shake your head.

This play­ful­ness is the film’s strong suit, and to that end the cast­ing of Lizzy Caplan as the Horsemen’s delight­ful­ly grotesque new recruit, Lula, is a mas­ter­stroke. Her sar­don­ic mag­ic acts involve a lot of fake blood (appar­ent­ly she earned her rep­u­ta­tion pulling a hat out of a rab­bit). And Caplan more than holds her own against her male coun­ter­parts, with Lula rou­tine­ly call­ing her fel­low Horse­men out on their casu­al sexism.

This is a film that des­per­ate­ly wants you to believe that it’s clever. Char­ac­ters con­stant­ly, self-con­scious­ly, allude to what lies beneath the sur­face or behind the cur­tain. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the result is dis­joint­ed and incon­sis­tent – a series of inef­fec­tive twists that nei­ther sur­prise nor make any sense. It som­er­saults towards a lack­lus­tre final act by way of tan­gen­tial set pieces and over­wrought action scenes, so that in the end you’re left not with a sense of won­der, but a feel­ing of disenchantment.