In Theaters: NOW YOU SEE ME 2 (2016)

NOW YOU SEE ME 2
(US/China - 2016)

Directed by Jon M. Chu. Written by Ed Solomon. Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Mark Ruffalo, Woody Harrelson, Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, Dave Franco, Daniel Radcliffe, Lizzy Caplan, Jay Chou, Sanaa Lathan, David Warshofsky, Tsai Chin, Ben Lamb, Richard Laing. (PG-13, 129 mins)

Sure, 2013's enjoyable NOW YOU SEE ME was a sleeper hit, grossing $120 million in the US, but was anyone demanding more? Apparently so, as it did almost double that overseas. In what will go down as one of the least necessary sequels of the year, the thoroughly superfluous, $90 million NOW YOU SEE ME 2 isn't even inspired enough to be subtitled NOW YOU DON'T, and is the kind of perfunctory, clock-punching follow-up that makes you retroactively like the first one a little less. That film was directed by Luc Besson protege Louis Leterrier, a sure-handed pro who kept the story engaging and fast-moving, and really conveyed a knowledge and appreciation of magic. In the hands of STEP UP 2: THE STREETS, STEP UP 3D and JUSTIN BIEBER: NEVER SAY NEVER director Jon M. Chu, whose most recent film is 2015's flop-turned-inevitable-cult-movie JEM AND THE HOLOGRAMS, NOW YOU SEE ME 2's chief goal seems to be how many nonsensical dei ex machina it can pull out of its ass like rabbits out of a hat. NOW YOU SEE ME had the magician team of The Four Horsemen using their skills to bankrupt greedy and corrupt insurance titan Arthur Tressler (Michael Caine), whose company denied claims to scores of Hurricane Katrina victims. Tressler figures into the second half of this sequel in a way that you'll figure out long before the Four Horsemen do, but initially, the heroes--illusionist J. Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), hypnotist Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson) and presumed-dead street magician Jack Wilder (Dave Franco), along with new addition Lula May (Lizzy Caplan)--have been in hiding, but are called back to public view at the behest of The Eye, the top-secret society of magicians. Their assignment: expose tech billionaire Owen Case (Ben Lamb) as a fraud intending to use his software to steal the personal info of millions of his customers and sell it on the black market. But someone else hijacks their presentation, also publicly outing rogue FBI agent Dylan Rhodes (Mark Ruffalo), who's still pretending to pursue the Four Horsemen for the benefit of his boss (Sanaa Lathan), even though he was revealed to be the enigmatic Fifth Horsemen at the end of the first film.

The figure behind all the mayhem is Case's former partner Walter Mabry (Daniel Radcliffe), who faked his death a year earlier and has spent that time in Macau putting into play his Blofeldian plot to control the world's economy with a data chip device. Now a fugitive, Rhodes springs imprisoned magic debunker Thaddeus Bradley (Morgan Freeman) from custody and takes him to Macao to help get to the bottom of Mabry's plan. Of course, Bradley manages to get away from Rhodes--who blames Bradley for the magic trick mishap death of his father 30 years earlier--while the Four Horsemen pull off a complicated heist of the chip device from a top secret facility, with constant double-crosses coming from Mabry as well as Chase McKinney, Merritt's duplicitous and more-than-slightly effeminate twin brother played entirely too broadly by Harrelson, with a curly wig and a toothy grin that suggests what might've transpired had there ever been a hypothetical Marjoe Gortner one-man show based on the biography Center Square: The Paul Lynde Story.

NOW YOU SEE ME 2 is a mess. There's some of the charm of the first film in the camaraderie between the Four Horsemen, particularly some ballbusting between Atlas and McKinney, and it seems Eisenberg and Harrelson are having a good time. The globetrotting plot goes from NYC to Macao to London and makes a lot of noise, but not much sense. There's no sense of magic to a film where the tricks and illusions are all CGI'd or revealed to be some kind of absurdly complex conspiracy. Its twists and turns are such that the characters on the receiving end of them--be they the FBI, Mabry, Rhodes, various security guards, or Tressler--have to be completely incompetent idiots to fall for them (again in Tressler's case). The heist of the chip device starts out clever but becomes too belabored and improbable to even laugh at. The script, written by a returning Ed Solomon (BILL & TED'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE, MEN IN BLACK), has little consistency, especially with Freeman's Stevens, whose purpose and loyalties change with little or no logic or flow whenever the movie needs them to (he and Caine are just here for the paid vacation to Macau). Taiwanese singer and actor Jay Chou, who you probably haven't thought of since his turn as Kato in the forgotten Seth Rogen disaster THE GREEN HORNET, is on hand as another new Horseman once they arrive in Macau (his character's grandmother is played by veteran actress Tsai Chin, best known as the treacherous daughter of Christopher Lee in the 1960s FU MANCHU movies), but he barely figures into the story and only seems to be there to satisfy a Chinese co-production deal with TIK Films. He likely has more to do in the version being released in Asia, but his complete insignificance to the film only highlights the fact that more work went into negotiating the business deal than coming up with a coherent story to justify its existence.

Dumbest of all is the opening at the expose of Case, where the Four Horseman are posing as waiters, bartenders, and security staff to get behind the scenes. These are world-famous magicians and international fugitives and the subject of ongoing media scrutiny and yet, here they are, undisguised, milling about a highly publicized event at a massive arena for America's biggest tech mogul, TV cameras everywhere, and not a single person recognizes them. Even dumber, right there at the event is Rhodes, openly talking to the Horsemen near the stage, in full view of everyone even though his sole case seems to scouring the ends of the earth to find them. Compare that to a scene later on in London when each of the magicians just show up at various street corners to set up their final takedown of Mabry as everyone stops what they're doing and whips out their phones because they recognize them as globally-known celebrities. Everything in this film relies on contrivance and convenience. NOW YOU SEE ME was hard to swallow, but it was a fun movie that had some inspired moments. The sequel turns its heroes into a combination of David Copperfield, Jason Bourne, 007, and Wikileaks. Honestly, by the end, I had no idea what was going on and I really didn't care. And it was upon that realization that I felt a kinship to Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine that I will likely never feel again.

In Theaters: SPOTLIGHT (2015)

SPOTLIGHT
(US - 2015)

Directed by Tom McCarthy. Written by Josh Singer and Tom McCarthy. Cast: Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Liev Schreiber, John Slattery, Stanley Tucci, Brian D'Arcy James, Billy Crudup, Len Cariou, Jamey Sheridan, Paul Guilfoyle, Gene Amoroso, Neal Huff, Elena Wohl. (R, 128 mins)

"We've got two stories here: a story about degenerate clergy, and a story about a bunch of lawyers turning child abuse into a cottage industry. Which story do you want us to write? Because we're writing one of them."

As much a chronicle of the Boston Globe's breaking of a cover-up of systemic sexual abuse in the Catholic church as it is a document of a dying profession, SPOTLIGHT is a film that dives deep into the nitty gritty of newspaper reporting. What's refreshing is that it does so without the sense of heroism, martyrdom, and apologia that TRUTH, another recent journalism drama, rather shamelessly wallowed. In TRUTH, 60 MINUTES II producer Mary Mapes is crucified for rushed and sloppy work on a story about George W. Bush's days in the National Guard, but the film wants to make her a saint anyway, and an uncharacteristically grating Cate Blanchett's overwrought performance has her barreling through it doing everything short of wearing a "For Your Consideration" sandwich board to get awards attention. SPOTLIGHT goes in the opposite direction, immersing the audience in the daily grind of hardworking reporters. A lot of the film has them talking on phones, jotting down notes, and fumbling for a pen when theirs runs dry. They leave messages, check sources, meet interview subjects in coffee shops, sit outside offices waiting for an appointment, dig through files and old newspapers, and thumb through dog-eared reference books and directories chasing every tip, lead, and theory they get. They go where the story takes them as each new development opens up another Pandora's Box of paperwork and legal hurdles. A smart film that makes the boring minutiae of the job riveting, SPOTLIGHT may just be a notch below the great modern-era journalism films like Alan J. Pakula's ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN (1976) or, to an extent, David Fincher's ZODIAC (2007), but it's easily the best film about investigative reporting since Billy Ray's SHATTERED GLASS (2003).

After a prologue set in 1976, where a molesting priest is quietly ushered out of a police station by Boston Archdiocese officials, the story moves to the summer of 2001 with Globe's hiring of new chief editor Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber), a man known for his bottom-line concerns during stints in New York and Miami. Baron thinks there might be a story in an alarming number of allegations against that 1976 priest, which got a brief mention in the Metro section some time back, but was never pursued with any vigor by the paper. Wanting to re-establish the Globe as the local paper of record with a focus on Boston concerns, Baron directs the Spotlight team--a four-person crew of reporters who work on months-long investigative pieces--to chronicle the paper trail of accusations against the priest.  Led by editor Walter "Robby" Robinson (Michael Keaton), the Spotlight team--Mike Rezendes (a jumpy Mark Ruffalo), Sasha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams), and Matt Carroll (Brian D'Arcy James)--go to work, butting heads with lawyers, victims, church officials, rival papers, and concerned city big shots among others, not to mention the whole effort being jeopardized when Baron makes them put the story on the backburner for six weeks after September 11, 2001, during which time the Spotlight team is temporarily split up and assigned to other 9/11-related beats. Boston is a strongly Catholic community, and there's a concern that such talk may not rest well with the devout churchgoers. But when old Archdiocese guides show that many of the molesting priests--they eventually uncover 87 of them in Boston alone--were classified as "on sick leave" during times that coincide with the accusations, the Spotlight team correctly hypothesizes that it's a status given to priest reassigned to other parishes or sent away after an abuse incident that's settled privately and promptly buried by Cardinal Law (Len Cariou), the head of the Boston Archdiocese who's known of the plethora of incidents that have been going on for decades, with the cover-up trail leading all the way to the Vatican.

Directed and co-written by Tom McCarthy (THE STATION AGENT), who somehow made this and the career-worst Adam Sandler movie THE COBBLER in the same year, SPOTLIGHT boasts one of the year's strongest ensembles, headed by a resurgent Keaton on the heels of his triumphant BIRDMAN comeback. Keaton's been down this road before in Ron Howard's underrated THE PAPER (1994), and he's perfectly cast as the driven, quick-witted (when told by a lawyer friend that he read an article about Baron being the Globe's first Jewish editor, Robby replies "Really? Must've been a slow news day") Spotlight leader. McAdams and James are fine, but don't really stand out like Keaton or, for better or worse, Ruffalo, whose mannered performance takes some getting used to but is said to be an accurate portrayal of Rezendes. The actors also get sterling support from Billy Crudup and Jamey Sheridan as tight-lipped, big-shot attorneys behind a series of abuse case settlements, John Slattery as the Globe's managing editor Ben Bradlee, Jr. (whose father was executive editor of The Washington Post when Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein broke the Watergate story), and Stanley Tucci as victims' advocate Mitchell Garabedian, an eccentric, crusading lawyer who's been representing a number of abuse victims in their cases against the Archdiocese. SPOTLIGHT is as no-nonsense as its characters, a methodical and matter-of-fact grinder that tells its story as effectively as the Spotlight team pursued theirs. It doesn't make Baron, Robinson, and the writers into glory-seeking heroes--they're just people doing their job and doing it with commitment and tireless determination. TRUTH was about glory, but SPOTLIGHT is about the guts.

On DVD/Blu-ray: FOXCATCHER (2014) and THE CAPTIVE (2014)

FOXCATCHER
(US - 2014)

It couldn't have been that difficult to put together a riveting true crime drama about the events leading up to the 1996 murder of Olympic wrestler Dave Schultz at the hand of billionaire philanthropist John du Pont. Du Pont, played here by a prosthetic nose attached to Steve Carell, was the heir to the Du Pont chemical company fortune who dabbled in all sorts of professions--he was best-known as a respected ornithologist who published several books on birds--but had a passion for wrestling. In 1986, Du Pont contacts Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum), the younger brother of Dave (Mark Ruffalo), both of whom won gold medals in wrestling at the 1984 Olympics, about running a training facility for potential Olympic wrestlers at du Pont's Foxcatcher Farms compound in Wilmington, DE. Mark, depicted as a bit of a dumb lug, has grown tired of living in Dave's shadow, and since Dave is contractually tied down to his college coaching gig, Mark sees this as his chance to establish a legacy of his own, even though, as he constantly has to remind everyone, "I won a gold medal, too." A father-son bond forms between du Pont and Mark, though their relationship gets rocky, especially once Dave eventually joins the Foxcatcher team at du Pont's insistence, though it's not helped by du Pont's increasingly erratic behavior, including firing a gun in the gym and goading the impressionable, eager-to-please Mark into recreational cocaine use.

Director Bennett Miller (CAPOTE, MONEYBALL) and screenwriters E. Max Frye (SOMETHING WILD) and Dan Futterman (CAPOTE) play entirely too fast and loose with the facts of the case, so much so that it's hard to say which is the most egregious offense. It could be that the film seems to portray the events as taking place from 1986 to just after the Seoul qualifying tryouts in 1988, when in fact, the time period was 1986 to 1996. It could be the depiction of Mark leaving Foxcatcher after du Pont and Dave become chummy and Mark falls out of du Pont's good graces, when in fact, there was no sibling rivalry in regard to du Pont because the Schultz brothers didn't live or coach together at Foxcatcher--Dave moved his family to Foxcatcher a year after Mark quit following his last falling out with du Pont. It could be du Pont's mother (Vanessa Redgrave) and her disapproval of his wrestling fixation and the creation of Foxcatcher Farms, but in fact, she died before du Pont even created Foxcatcher Farms. Dramatic license is to be expected, but it's very vague exactly what the filmmakers are trying to show here. Essentially, it's about a rich, manipulative, socially inept weirdo whose mother had to buy friends for him when he was a child, and his codependent relationship with a none-too-bright wrestler who was tired of getting the leftover table scraps of his more popular brother. It's about a guy who develops an obsession with coaching wrestling so he can both please his disapproving mom and finally get a chance to be one of the guys, even if he has to drive a wedge between two loving brothers to achieve it. Except that du Pont didn't drive the brothers apart. FOXCATCHER is smoke-and-mirrors Oscar-baiting at its most cynical, starting with the stunt casting of Carell. Sure, it's a dramatic departure for a guy generally known for comedy, but since everything about FOXCATCHER is empty and meaningless, there's nothing there beyond the distracting fake nose. It's mind-boggling that this received five Oscar nominations, including acting nods for Carell and Ruffalo, who's good because he's Mark Ruffalo and he's always good, but this is hardly a standout performance in his career. Miller's direction and Frye & Futterman's script were also nominated, while the one legitimately great thing about FOXCATCHER--the revelatory work of Tatum--went ignored. In a textbook example of an internalized powderkeg of a performance, Tatum almost single-handedly makes the inexplicably feted FOXCATCHER worth enduring for 134 excruciating minutes. It's these kinds of performances that go unnoticed by awards outfits because they're too subtle and low-key, not like Carell acting all creepy with a ridiculous phony schnoz. FOXCATCHER is proof positive that Tatum can act, but otherwise, it's one of the worst awards-season prestige films in years. (R, 134 mins)



THE CAPTIVE
(Canada - 2014)

Coming quickly on the heels of his utterly superfluous West Memphis Three chronicle DEVIL'S KNOT, the once-great Canadian auteur Atom Egoyan continues his decade-long slide into irrelevance with the maddeningly uneven THE CAPTIVE. With only 2008's ADORATION showing signs of the Egoyan of old, the filmmaker has spent most of his time over the last ten or so years making documentaries and short films as passion projects while keeping food on the table by directing commercial thrillers like WHERE THE TRUTH LIES (2005) and CHLOE (2009), an erotic thriller that felt 15 years old the day it was released. Egoyan tries to have the best of both worlds with THE CAPTIVE and while the film has its moments, it just doesn't work as a whole. Most of THE CAPTIVE is made up of the same kind of fractured, non-linear narrative that old-school Egoyan fans will recognize from his 1990s masterpieces EXOTICA and THE SWEET HEREAFTER. In the outskirts of Niagara Falls, ON, 21-year-old Cass (Alexia Fast) was abducted eight years earlier by Mika (Kevin Durand) and kept in a locked basement room. Mika allows her webcam access to function as a "gateway," luring other young girls into a vaguely-defined underage kidnapping ring. Cass' separated parents, Matthew (Ryan Reynolds) and Tina (Mireille Enos) are shells of what they once were, and Tina blames Matthew for Cass' disappearance (he stopped at a bakery to get a pie for dessert that night as 13-year-old Cass was taken while lying down in the backseat of his truck). The cops, led by crusading Dunlop (Rosario Dawson) and hot-headed Cornwall (Scott Speedman), seem pretty set on the idea that financially-strapped Matthew is behind Cass' disappearance, at least until Dunlop herself goes missing after a benefit dinner for a charity organization that helps victims of child sex trafficking.

All of this plot is parsed out in bits and pieces as Egoyan jumps around the eight-year timeline. It gradually comes together like it does in his best work, and in that best work, attentive viewers begin piecing the puzzle and marveling at Egoyan's expert story construction and devastating emotional impact. THE CAPTIVE has the puzzle part down, but not so much the expert story construction and the devastating emotional impact. Once the pieces are in place, Egoyan doles out one ludicrous and often laughable contrivance after another. Mika is one of these limitlessly wealthy psychos who has the time and the technological wherewithal to plant cameras in the rooms of an entire floor of the hotel where Tina works, for the sole purpose of leaving Cass' childhood trinkets and mementos--a hairbrush, an ice-skating trophy, baby teeth--in plain sight for her to see, taunting her from afar as he watches her on a row of monitors on a control panel at his mansion. It doesn't help that, as in DEVIL'S KNOT, Egoyan has directed Durand to go hammy, playing Mika broadly and completely unbelievably. Like Sharlto Copley in Spike Lee's remake of OLDBOY, Durand doesn't even seem to be in the same movie as the other actors, looking like an anachronistic, erudite David Niven/Errol Flynn-type and behaving like a cartoon character, but somehow never drawing attention to himself and never becoming a suspect, even though he visits one other busted member of a pedophile ring in jail. Also, when Dunlop is roofied and taken from the gala benefit, she's at the same table as Mika and a strange woman (Christine Horne) in an obvious wig, and nobody seems to notice that the guest speaker is stumbling and bumbling and needs to be helped out of the building and into a waiting limo by this mystery woman. Is there an entire secret society of child abductors in this town? And are they less interested in pedophilia and more focused on using high-tech surveillance to spy on their parents and the cops?  How in the hell does Mika have remote access to turn on the webcam on Cornwall's laptop so he can spy on Cornwall and Dunlop discussing their investigation? If Egoyan were ever to direct an episode of LAW & ORDER: SVU, it would probably look a lot like THE CAPTIVE, right down to the detectives standing around the office and chiming in with bits of exposition as the camera moves around them. The only thing missing is Dunlop calling in Richard Belzer's retired John Munch to consult on the case. Witness this stunning exercise in textbook Dick Wolfery:

Detective 1: "Maybe there was a watcher."
Detective 2: "Or watchers."
Detective 3: "A whole new class of freaks."

More than a little reminiscent of Denis Villeneuve's PRISONERS, THE CAPTIVE could've worked one of two ways: as a total throwback, give-the-arthouse-nerds-what-they-want Atom Egoyan film (fixtures like Bruce Greenwood and Egoyan's wife Arsinee Khanjian have minor supporting roles!) or as a ludicrous-but-just-roll-with-it multiplex thriller, where the contrivances and the silliness could've been easier to overlook, and a moment like Cornwall, one of the most unjustifiably cocky cops you'll ever see (he's always wrong!), finally getting clocked by an enraged Matthew would've served as a real crowd-pleaser. But Egoyan is just lost. He comes up short at both ends of the spectrum and seems to have no idea what he's doing or who his films are even for anymore. Egoyan is too smart to let the rampant stupidity of THE CAPTIVE's second half even happen, especially after making such a concerted effort to present the first half as quintessential Egoyan. I'm a sucker for depictions of cold, snowy, desolate Canada and the film does succeed on that front, and Egoyan does get two strong performances from Reynolds and Enos, both of whom seem to dominate the "smart" portions of the movie, but THE CAPTIVE is yet another sign that a slumping Egoyan desperately needs to locate his apparently abducted mojo. (R, 112 mins)

In Theaters: NOW YOU SEE ME (2013)

NOW YOU SEE ME
(US - 2013)

Directed by Louis Leterrier.  Written by Ed Solomon, Boaz Yakin, and Edward Ricourt.  Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Mark Ruffalo, Woody Harrelson, Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, Melanie Laurent, Isla Fisher, Dave Franco, Common, Michael Kelly, David Warshofsky, Jose Garcia, Caitriona Balfe. (PG-13, 110 mins)

A sort-of OCEAN'S MAGICIANS if you will, the fast-paced NOW YOU SEE ME is a light-hearted and mostly enjoyable caper movie that has elaborate, large-scale heists being pulled off by a team of celebrity illusionists.  The team--dubbed "The Four Horsemen"--consists of the cocky J. Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), mentalist/hypnotist Merritt Osbourne (Woody Harrelson), escape artist Henley Reeves (Isla Fisher), and con man Jack Wilder (Dave Franco), assembled a year earlier when they were scraping by as small-time hustlers and street magicians, brought together by an elusive fifth horseman.  The Four Horsemen stage the first of three jobs as part of a mysterious plan that, of course, doesn't reveal itself until the very end:  first they somehow empty a bank vault in Paris while on stage in Vegas.  Then, in New Orleans, they drain the bank account of their sponsor and insurance magnate Arthur Tressler (Michael Caine) and deposit the money into the accounts of the audience members, all victims of Hurricane Katrina whose claims were shot down by Tressler's company.  Finally, they plot to steal a huge safe in NYC.  But why?

Irate FBI agent Dylan Rhodes (Mark Ruffalo) teams with French Interpol agent Alma Dray (Melanie Laurent) to investigate, but can't hold the Horsemen because there's really no proof that they did anything.  The magic isn't real and despite their open admission of guilt, they can't be detained or charged because, as Doug Henning might say, "it's an illusion!"  Also tracking the Horsemen is Thaddeus Bradley (Morgan Freeman), a magic expert who hosts a popular cable TV show that exposes and debunks magic tricks and those who perform them.  Bradley is being paid $5 million by a mystery benefactor to expose the Horsemen and their tricks, and Rhodes immediately suspects him to be the fifth Horseman.

"The closer you look, the less you'll actually see" is a common refrain for the characters in NOW YOU SEE ME, and with the inevitable twist--and it's a whopper--the film kinda flies off the rails a bit.  The filmmakers--director Louis Leterrier (TRANSPORTER 2, THE INCREDIBLE HULK) and writers Ed Solomon (MEN IN BLACK), Boaz Yakin (FRESH, SAFE), and Edward Ricourt--generally play fair when you go back and re-examine the film upon learning the fifth horseman's identity, but it does get a little silly by the end, and the subplot about the secret magician's society and the "Eye of Horus" never really comes together.  But when NOW YOU SEE ME is focused on the caper and the characters, it's great fun throughout.  The banter between the magicians is well-played, particularly by Eisenberg and Harrelson, and Ruffalo's teeth-gritting slow burn throughout, especially when losing his patience with Eisenberg (playing his SOCIAL NETWORK smug condescension act for laughs) or in his verbal sparring with Freeman (illustrating a trick, Freeman asks "What's the magic word?" to which Ruffalo replies "Blow me") is very entertaining.  The film tries too hard to knock your socks off by the end, and of course you can pick it apart and see the lapses in logic if you really want to (and there's too much CGI in some of the magic trickery), but we're not dealing with THE ASPHALT JUNGLE, BOB LA FLAMBEUR, or THIEF here.  It's a summer movie with laughs, suspense, and a likable cast (even Freeman is uncharacteristically loose throughout, and it's always great to see an enraged Caine spitting out his dialogue), but it finally stumbles when it isn't content to just be what it is.  Another script polish--and fleshing out or just eliminating all the Horus stuff--might've made a good movie better, but as it is, it's still quite fun.