Jean-Paul’s Rating: 2/5 stars
Bottom Line: A mess of a movie. All the complications of the original movie but with none of the magic.
The original “Now You See Me” was not a good movie but it was a fun movie. It had magic in both the stage magic sense and the movie magic sense. “Now You See Me 2” is even less of a not good movie than the first and while it retains some of its stage magic sense, it has none of the movie magic of the first.
The movie starts out strong enough reintroducing much of the old cast and a new female Horseman. It has the feel and fun tone that was present in the first movie. That goes away pretty quickly after the introductions are complete. We are then subjected to the Horsemen coming out of hiding to perform an expose of some tech giant who is “stealing everybody’s information” with his new gizmo. Scary. Everything is not what it seems, though. You see, this whole expose is actually part of a long con revenge game by Thaddeus Bradley (Morgan Freeman), who they sent to jail in the first movie. Thaddeus exposes the Horsemen and with the help of Harry Potter, who faked his own death because of ???, blackmails the Horsemen into stealing a microchip that ??? in order to ??? thus enabling the bad guys to ???. Meanwhile, the Horsemen plot ways to keep the microchip out of the bad guy’s hands and ??? in grand style while simultaneously keeping the FBI chasing their own tail. There is also the mysterious Eye organization which feeds information to the Horsemen in order to ???. In the end, it turns out that just about everyone you see was actually in on the plot the entire time and people you thought were friends were enemies and people you thought were enemies were friends and there are big reveals and it all leaves you feeling so ???.
Play Mad Libs with the above paragraph as much as you like. No matter what you come up with, it will probably make as much sense as this movie did. That isn’t to say there was nothing good about the movie. The magic tricks themselves were generally pretty cool and had enough reveal/secrecy to keep you guessing. It’s just, man, what a mess of a movie. Take your hard earned money elsewhere, I says.