Now You See Me 2

A team of the world’s finest magicians known as The Horsemen are back up to their tricks of exposing the corrupt and seedy financial doings of evildoers around the world. But, this time Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), Dylan (Mark Ruffalo), Merritt (Woody Harrelson), Jack (Dave Franco), and newcomer Lula (Lizzy Caplan) find themselves kidnapped and shipped to China on a quest for a “broom chip” a microchip capable of sweeping any computer system to steal or control information. At the same time antagonist Thaddeus Bradley (Morgan Freeman) and separately the F.B.I. are on the hunt for the group as well. It will take trickery of the highest caliber for The Horsemen to evade and elude their captors, perhaps the jig will be up after all?nowyouseeme2 Directed by Jon Chu and written mainly by Ed Solomon this delve back into the world of finger flickers, mentalism masters, and tricksters cuts little into new territory but instead continues a waltz into mediocrity by failing to follow the basic rules of magic as outlined by Maskelyne and Devant in their book Our Magic; the art of the illusion and the role of the magician is unfortunately lost for the sake of cinematic glitz and glamour. Worse yet, as any good magician really knows, the audience really doesn’t want to know how things are done– even if they beg and plead to know how something is done, magic’s true power is its ability to inspire wonder and the possibility of what if. In the case of the Now You See Me series, the big secrets are given up easily which subsequently deflates the films of their power. On the flip side from an actual working and practical standpoint, props to the actors for actually learning some of the card manipulations required to perform magic, that actually took a bit of practice. Bottom line, check your brain and enjoy the visuals but don’t hope for depth. Maybe a matinee, Now You See Me 2 is rated PG-13.