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Sep. 15th, 2016 11:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretNow You See Me 2
I loved the first film enough that I actually requested it for Yuletide one year. Somehow the release of the sequel slipped past my awareness until Facebook started spamming me with ads for it, at which point I made a point to watch it.
I was disappointed by the sequel. It didn't ever seem to get its footing in the way the first one did in terms of telling interesting stories about the characters, and it seemed less enthralled with the power of magic and more convinced that magic was the refuge of manipulative misanthropes. NYSM skated past its imprecise plotting by being such a joyful film. NYSM2 was largely joyless.
Lizzy Caplan was a rare exception- stepping in for Isla Fisher as the token female Horseman, she brought energy and mystery and comic sexiness to the film that it desperately needed. That being said, it would've been better if the film had more interesting female characters besides her- Sanaa Lathan's police supervisor seemed like her scenes had probably been cut back, based on her lack of interaction with Dylan or any of the Horsemen, Melanie Laurent's French detective from the first film was sorely missed, and I'm disappointed that my weird pet theory about Hermia, Bradley's assistant, being more important to Bradley's plans than the first film suggested got no further evidence in film 2. The presence of the token female Horseman is grating no matter how cleverly they subvert it, and how effective the character actually is. I will say that I appreciated how intentionally they made it clear that she was not Atlas's new love interest.
And then you had Atlas and Jack get basically no character development, and the weird thing with two Woody Harrelsons had no emotional payoff in the end. Bradley was great (Morgan Freeman being morally ambiguous, duh), and we got one awesome Bradley/Tressler scene (they were definitely a couple at some point, right?), but then the Bradley/Dylan stuff had the laziest payoff because I guess they've shoved resolving Dylan's daddy issues for real to the third movie. Obviously Lionel Shrike is not dead, they've been hitting us on the head with how obvious that is for two movies now (First Jack's fake death, then Mabry's fake death... then Dylan surviving despite being apparently killed in literally the same vault that apparently killed his father), but they're unwilling to reveal him yet.
But Mabry was the movie's biggest problem. Daniel Radcliffe playing a manic sociopath was supposed to be the big new addition to the movie, the thing that upped the ante from the first film, but he was just not amped up enough to really be scary to the Horsemen. He never pushed any of his scenes far enough, never made it seem like he was actually worse than Tressler, and Tressler's mid-film reappearance undermined Mabry even further, making it seem like he wasn't competent enough to fight the Horsemen without assistance from papa. A demonic, soulless Daniel Radcliffe would have foiled Atlas perfectly, battle of the nerds for magical dominance, but he never got anywhere close to pushing Atlas, and the Horsemen coasted to a victory that was somehow both too easy and not easy enough- too easy because you never got the sense that they could actually lose, not easy enough in the sense that they were accomplishing their magical wonders with the breezy self-confidence of the first film's Horsemen.
In truth, the first raid on Octa was a monkeywrench in the film's sense of fun that they never really overcame. After showing the Horsemen so publicly humiliated, you would think that in addition to making contact with the Eye, there would be a sense of needing to prove themselves as stage magicians again, but that dynamic was left out of the film, so after that scene, I had lost confidence in the showmanship of the Horsemen, a confidence they never tried to re-earn. Was London a frothy triumph in the vein of the Vegas/France heist of the first film? Yes, but it had no character oomph behind it.
I loved the first film enough that I actually requested it for Yuletide one year. Somehow the release of the sequel slipped past my awareness until Facebook started spamming me with ads for it, at which point I made a point to watch it.
I was disappointed by the sequel. It didn't ever seem to get its footing in the way the first one did in terms of telling interesting stories about the characters, and it seemed less enthralled with the power of magic and more convinced that magic was the refuge of manipulative misanthropes. NYSM skated past its imprecise plotting by being such a joyful film. NYSM2 was largely joyless.
Lizzy Caplan was a rare exception- stepping in for Isla Fisher as the token female Horseman, she brought energy and mystery and comic sexiness to the film that it desperately needed. That being said, it would've been better if the film had more interesting female characters besides her- Sanaa Lathan's police supervisor seemed like her scenes had probably been cut back, based on her lack of interaction with Dylan or any of the Horsemen, Melanie Laurent's French detective from the first film was sorely missed, and I'm disappointed that my weird pet theory about Hermia, Bradley's assistant, being more important to Bradley's plans than the first film suggested got no further evidence in film 2. The presence of the token female Horseman is grating no matter how cleverly they subvert it, and how effective the character actually is. I will say that I appreciated how intentionally they made it clear that she was not Atlas's new love interest.
And then you had Atlas and Jack get basically no character development, and the weird thing with two Woody Harrelsons had no emotional payoff in the end. Bradley was great (Morgan Freeman being morally ambiguous, duh), and we got one awesome Bradley/Tressler scene (they were definitely a couple at some point, right?), but then the Bradley/Dylan stuff had the laziest payoff because I guess they've shoved resolving Dylan's daddy issues for real to the third movie. Obviously Lionel Shrike is not dead, they've been hitting us on the head with how obvious that is for two movies now (First Jack's fake death, then Mabry's fake death... then Dylan surviving despite being apparently killed in literally the same vault that apparently killed his father), but they're unwilling to reveal him yet.
But Mabry was the movie's biggest problem. Daniel Radcliffe playing a manic sociopath was supposed to be the big new addition to the movie, the thing that upped the ante from the first film, but he was just not amped up enough to really be scary to the Horsemen. He never pushed any of his scenes far enough, never made it seem like he was actually worse than Tressler, and Tressler's mid-film reappearance undermined Mabry even further, making it seem like he wasn't competent enough to fight the Horsemen without assistance from papa. A demonic, soulless Daniel Radcliffe would have foiled Atlas perfectly, battle of the nerds for magical dominance, but he never got anywhere close to pushing Atlas, and the Horsemen coasted to a victory that was somehow both too easy and not easy enough- too easy because you never got the sense that they could actually lose, not easy enough in the sense that they were accomplishing their magical wonders with the breezy self-confidence of the first film's Horsemen.
In truth, the first raid on Octa was a monkeywrench in the film's sense of fun that they never really overcame. After showing the Horsemen so publicly humiliated, you would think that in addition to making contact with the Eye, there would be a sense of needing to prove themselves as stage magicians again, but that dynamic was left out of the film, so after that scene, I had lost confidence in the showmanship of the Horsemen, a confidence they never tried to re-earn. Was London a frothy triumph in the vein of the Vegas/France heist of the first film? Yes, but it had no character oomph behind it.