Now You See Me 2 (2016)

“Now You See Me… and now you kinda wish you didn’t.”


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Lets start by showing y’all the trailers shall we?

🎥 Trailers First

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Non-Spoiler Plot Overview

A year after outsmarting the FBI, The Four Horsemen (with one replacement, Lula, since Henley’s just gone without explanation 🙃) resurface with a new performance. But things go sideways when they’re exposed by a tech billionaire — who turns out to be… Daniel Radcliffe. Yes, Harry Potter himself.

He forces them into pulling off an impossible heist: stealing a chip that can hack every computer system in the world. Meanwhile, Dylan Rhodes is still juggling his double-life as both FBI agent and secret Horsemen ally, and Thaddeus Bradley is back, still smirking on the sidelines.

What should be a globe-trotting, magic-heist thrill ride mostly becomes… messy. Way too much CGI, goofy set-pieces that feel like rejected Fast & Furious stunts, and a story that trips over itself trying to outsmart the audience.


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Character Rundown

Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg): Still smug, still thinks he’s the leader. He gets sidelined by worse writing.

Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson): My favorite in the first movie… now ruined. They give him a long-lost evil twin (yes, really), and it’s one of the dumbest subplots ever.

Jack Wilder (Dave Franco): He’s alive! After faking his death in the first film, he’s just… back, with little consequence.

Lula (Lizzy Caplan): The newbie Horseman. She’s quirky and fun, but written like a stand-in for Isla Fisher rather than her own unique character.

Dylan Rhodes (Mark Ruffalo): Still playing the frazzled FBI agent/secret mastermind, but this time the dual-role shtick gets confusing and bogged down.

Thaddeus Bradley (Morgan Freeman): Back again, doing the “I know everything” routine, though the movie doesn’t even use him well.

Walter Mabry (Daniel Radcliffe): The villain. And… wow. Talk about a weird casting choice. He’s not threatening, he’s not funny, he’s not clever — he just feels like Daniel Radcliffe wandered onto the wrong set.


🎩 The Horsemen Were Never Meant to Be Heroes

One of the biggest misconceptions this franchise fell into over time is treating the Four Horsemen like protagonists. In the original film, they were never supposed to be the “good guys.” They were morally gray illusionists — antiheroes at best — using sleight of hand, manipulation, and spectacle to expose corruption while committing crimes themselves. That tension between “are they justice or chaos?” was what made the first movie work so well.

But as the series went on, the studio started misunderstanding its own premise. Instead of keeping that mystery alive, the sequels polished the Horsemen into marketable heroes — quippy, charming, and safe. The edge was gone. What started as a morally complex story about revenge, illusion, and control slowly turned into a glossy superhero ensemble with sparkly magic tricks instead of personality.

By the third film, they’re no longer magicians bending reality — they’re practically Avengers with smoke machines. The fun was watching the trick unfold. The downfall was when the trick became the entire show.

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Pacing / Flow

Bloated. This movie is way too long and drags itself through ridiculous subplots. The momentum of the first film is gone. Instead of tight heist energy, you get random globe-hopping (Macau, London, New York) stitched together with CGI-heavy “magic tricks” that feel more like Marvel VFX demos than illusions.


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Pros ✨

Some of the tricks are fun in concept (like the card-throwing sequence), even if execution is way too over-the-top.

Lizzy Caplan brings some humor and fresh energy.

Daniel Radcliffe is at least memorable, even if for all the wrong reasons.



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Cons ❌

Way too much CGI replaces the practical-feeling magic of the first film.

The villain is flat, unthreatening, and feels out of place.

The “evil twin” subplot is laughably bad.

The heist plot is convoluted and lacks the clever payoff of the first.

The film tries so hard to one-up the original twist that it just collapses under its own nonsense.

Characters feel sidelined or reduced to caricatures.

Way too much sequel-baiting and not enough standalone payoff.



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The Daniel Radcliffe Problem 🎩🧙

Look, I can’t be the only one who basically remembers this as “the movie where Daniel Radcliffe showed up for some reason.” He’s not menacing. He’s not funny. He’s not even eccentric enough to be memorable as a Bond-style villain. He just… exists. And the only magic trick here is how the casting director thought this would work.


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Final Thoughts

Where the first Now You See Me was sleek, stylish, and genuinely fun, this sequel is bloated, messy, and confused about what made the original great. It swaps cleverness for CGI, logic for cheap twists, and strong characters for caricatures.

This is officially where the franchise started losing its magic, pun completely intended

Rating: 4/10 🃏💻


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⚠️ Spoiler Warning! ⚠️

This is where the dumb plot twists rear their ugly heads.


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Spoilers 🃏

So here’s the “big reveals” this movie thinks are genius:

The Horsemen are forced to steal a computer chip in Macau, but half the “heist” is just them showing off with overlong CGI card tricks. When they finally get it, it’s revealed that the whole heist was staged — Daniel Radcliffe’s Walter Mabry was manipulating them the entire time. Except… no. Because Dylan Rhodes was secretly manipulating him.

And then — twist! Thaddeus Bradley wasn’t an enemy after all. He was secretly helping Dylan Rhodes this whole time. They retcon his character arc into this weird pseudo-mentor role.

Oh, and the “evil twin” thing? Merritt’s twin brother, Chase, shows up to help Mabry. It’s Woody Harrelson in a bad wig and worse dialogue, and it’s played so straight it feels like parody.

The finale tries to go big with a London Eye set-piece, where the Horsemen reveal the whole time they were orchestrating everything, broadcasting it worldwide to expose Mabry. But by then, it’s just exhausting. The film wants to be clever, but it feels like the cinematic equivalent of a kid saying “gotcha!” after making up the rules mid-game.

The first film pulled off the magic trick of tricking the audience. This sequel? It just insults their intelligence.