Director: Jon M. Chu
Year Released: 2016
Rating: 0.0
Unfortunate sequel to what I believe was the worst movie of 2013 has "magicians" the Horsemen (Jesse Eisenberg, Mark Ruffalo, Woody Harrelson, Dave Franco and Lizzy Caplan) going up against a hacker living in Macau (Daniel Radcliffe) and his wealthy father (Michael Caine) in a plot too incoherent to bother typing out. Ed Solomon, the screenwriter of the first movie, returns with even more "twists" and "big speeches" and "magic tricks" (CGI is not magic), with every scene containing at least one eye-roll moment: the tacky card-flipping sequence in the Macau Science Center, the discovery that Harrelson has an "evil twin brother," the ability of Ruffalo - wanted by (his employer!) the FBI - to somehow free a prisoner (Morgan Freeman) and use a jet to get out of the country without being detected, the ability of Ruffalo - the son of a dead magician! (of course!) - to free himself from a safe with a magical watch, and so on. It's so consistently punishing aesthetically and so moronically structured one has to wonder whether or not the biggest joke is on the viewer for voluntarily screening it: fool me once, shame on you ... fool me twice, shame on you again (if they make a third film - and they probably will - someone call the Cinema Police on them).
