"Now You See Me" was a personal guilty pleasure of 2013, it was absolutely unpretentious and unbelievable but it knew it was so and with the help of a talented cast and a couple of good characters and story beats it turned out as a fine time at the theater. Its sequel starts out with the same unpretentious and fun vibe of the first only to slowly escalate up to what becomes one of the most lifeless and visually painful experiences of the year.
As I said the movie started out really fine, in the sense that it was doing what I wanted it to do. Nobody should or would walk into this film expecting the new "Heat", I just wanted to have some dumb fun, with a self referential film that doesn't take anything seriously and up to the fist two set-pieces of the film that's what I was getting. The cast was working the best they could and the action felt fluent and visually pleasing, there was a rhythm to it and a reason for it in particular.
Yet, as soon as we start getting into this film's second act things fall apart to a mind numbing degree and I mean that literally, my mind went blank with the level of stupidity and inconsequentially of what was going on, I watched this film in a state of trance where I couldn't tell if I was dozing off or simply bored to death.
"Now You See Me 2" takes the levels of suspense of disbelief to a whole new world where not even laughing at the film proves to be of any kind of satisfaction, everything going on is just visual noise and other than being filmed in the most uninteresting and unstylish way possible, it has no momentum, no character, it's just there for the sake of extravaganza and it keeps going on for unbelievable amounts of time and it never proves to be any kind of pleasant.
And we haven't even taken into consideration the logistical implications of what happens. It is just crazy. There is no grit of grounding of actions, stuff just keeps happening on top of other stuff and without any kind of character or story implications the film becomes more of a showcase of dull visual tricks. Not to mention the story twists it spices in which are preposterous to even think about and sprinkled with silly clichés and dialogue that not even Ruffalo or Freeman, two of the greatest actors, manage to make even passable.
I got a head ache from this movie, it was a terrible experience, I don't recommend it and the shortness of my review is reflective of how lost with words I am about it.
