In its first few minutes, Now You See Meintroduces four magicians trying to make a living through legal or illegal means. But perhaps the most important question of all is who exactly our heroes are, because at least one of the characters in Now You See Me isn't who they claim to be. In the end, our questions have less to do with how our protagonists set up their complex schemes and more with what they stood to gain from them. But even with all the carpet-pulls and sleights of hand that fill this 2013 thriller, nothing prepares audiences for the film's ultimate reveal. After all, the closer you look - the movie tells you - the more prone you are to being duped. In Louis Leterrier's Now You See Me, heist and magic come together to create a story so full of twists and turns that it can be hard to keep up, even if you are watching very closely. Being in the dark not only allows us to be amazed, it also gives us the opportunity to create our own theories about how someone could pull off such an intricate deception. And you’ll all but certainly see them again-in Now You See Me 3.In a way, heist movies and magic tricks are a lot alike: at the same time we claim to want to know how things are done, we derive more pleasure from the experience of not knowing. “The best tricks,” says Morgan Freeman’s character, “work on many levels.” Now You See Me 2 is a multi-leveled magic show, heist caper, comedy, drama and globetrotting action-adventure romp with characters whose company you’ll find most enjoyable. That doesn’t make it any less amazing, or any less wondrous. Magic, it lets us know, requires practice, hard work, concentration, planning, patience and super skills. One of the coolest things about Now You See Me 2, like its predecessor, is how it shows the audience how its trickery is done-after the razzle-dazzle, it pulls back the curtain to reveal the nuts-and-bolts explanation behind each jaw-dropping effect, the trap doors, the trickery, the switcheroo, the behind-the-scene hustle-bustle that made the illusion possible. In one of the movie’s best running gags, Harrelson has a ball in a new, “surprise” role-in addition to the smooth-talking hypnotist Merritt McKinney, he also plays his sibling-rival twin brother, Chase, who sports a head of curly hair and a mouth full gleaming white chompers. It’s the movie’s centerpiece trick, a sexy, super-slick bit of slight of hand, and a showpiece of computer-assisted “card-istry.” The plot gets bogged down a bit as it tries to layer on detail and backstory, but when the Horsemen get down to business, things really come alive-like in an absolutely stunning sequence in which the purloined computer chip, attached to the front of a playing card, is masterfully flipped, flung and flicked from Horseman to Horseman to avoid detection while they’re each being searched. Chu, whose resume includes two of the Step Up dance flicks, keeps things moving along briskly with a sense of fun, fizz and sizzle as the do-gooder scamps zip from New York to China to London, trying to stay one step ahead of the law. The only problem is, which hands are the wrong hands, and which are the right ones? In a movie about magic and misdirection, it’s awfully hard to tell.ĭirector Jon M. Joining the cast is former Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe as a megalomaniacal tech billionaire who hijacks the Horsemen to coerce them into heisting a new super-high-tech computer chip that, if delivered into the wrong hands, would compromise the privacy of every computer-and every computer user-in the world. Morgan Freeman again rounds out the ensemble as Thaddeus Bradley, a former master magician-turned-trick-debunker who was framed and sent to prison for the group’s last big caper.
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