PRACTICAL magic
The sequel with plenty of new tricks up its sleeve.
Now You See Me 2
Starring Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Mark
Ruffalo, Daniel Radcliffe, Lizzy Caplan, Michael Caine,
Morgan Freeman
Director Jon M. Chu
ETA 8 July The last time we saw The Four Horsemen, we didn’t see them at all. Having flung themselves off a skyscraper in a shower of money, Now You See
Me’s all-star magic gang vanished at the end of the first movie after pulling the ultimate switcheroo on Morgan Freeman’s devious benefactor, Mark Ruffalo’s FBI employers and us – the audience who spent most of the film thinking we actually knew what we were watching.
Reappearing for Part 2, the Horsemen are back on stage – but this time we’re right up there with them. “The first movie was sort of a big magic show for the audience, but now you’re going to get to be on the other side of the curtain,” explains Jon M. Chu ( G.I. Joe: Retaliation), stepping in to replace departing director Louis Leterrier. “The trick is on our magicians this time and they’re the ones that need to get out of the box.”
Set a few years after the Robin Hood heroics in Las Vegas, the gang are still in hiding, still squabbling over who should be frontman and still bored of biding their time for a comeback. Any thoughts of following up their lead on the shadowy secret society known as ‘The Eye’ are shelved again when a dangerous new backer starts playing them at their own game – putting them on the receiving end of an elaborate, mind-melting game of entrapment.
“No one would have gotten involved if this was just another sequel,” explains Chu. “But this is the complete reverse of the first movie. In the first one they’re sort of forced together, and now they have to choose to be together. And as soon as that happens, we throw a few more characters into the mix to really shake things up…”
Freeman and Ruffalo are re-joined by Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Dave Franco and Michael Caine – with Lizzy Caplan’s geek-magician replacing Isla Fischer’s escapologist, and Daniel Radcliffe stepping in to add even more weight to the hefty cast list.
“Weirdly, Daniel plays a guy who’s horrible at magic,” laughs Chu of Radcliffe’s anti-Potter tech-head, a young tycoon who backs the Horsemen into a heist and ends up fighting the gang across two continents in a magic battle royale. “He’s someone who’s been burnt by magic and has turned to technology instead. He also loves to explain how he does everything, which is pretty much the opposite of what a magician is supposed to do. So it’s a fun perspective, and Daniel comes in and completely owns it. He’s just delicious in this role.”
With the whole cast refining the hard-earned skills they trained for on the first movie (Franco can apparently slice a banana from across the room with a playing card, Eisenberg pulls off a mean sleight of hand and “Woody has never stopped being a mentalist….”), The Horsemen are set for a colossal comeback that’s aiming to up the ante again with its
real magic set-pieces. Promising fire-fights, frozen rain, a hall of mirrors and Jesse Eisenberg melting into the London pavement – Now You See Me 2 called for a lot of practical problem-solving from Chu and the on-set magic consultants.
sorcerer’s apprentices
“The whole point of magic is that you see that it’s not a trick,” says Chu. “We all know that you can do anything with CG, but if you start to do that, your audience just checks out. So we tried to do as much as we possibly could for real. I’d say 85 per cent of the movie is practical stuff – real, actual magic tricks. When you watch the movie, you know you’re watching a real magic show.”
With one Chinese extra hospitalised after slamming his face into a glass window, dozens of A-list bruises and countless hours wasted in London waiting for the real rain to stop before the crew could set up the fake weather machines, wouldn’t it have been easier to create the “magic” in a computer?
“Absolutely!” laughs Chu. “There’s one trick in the movie that we built this huge, expensive, very complicated contraption for. In any other movie, it would have been some string, a green screen and two seconds on a laptop. But you can feel it – the weight, the gravity of all the details. It’s what makes the movie magic. We made a pact before we went in that we would hold each other accountable for keeping it real, and we never backed down from that.” With a second sequel already rumoured, Now You
See Me 2 might not be giving up all its secrets just yet – but we can still expect an awful lot of tricks from the series with the baggiest sleeves in the business.