The quirky Robin Hood magician-thieves return for another massively overlong, overcomplicated and underinteresting caper, prestidigitating more bad guys out of their ill-gotten gains. Basically, we encounter the same problems of putting magic in a film. Magic is great in real life, but in a made-up world it becomes strangely pointless, because the entire artifice of fiction in the movies is itself a magic trick, and the challenge of a magician’s illusion is nullified from the outset.
Anyway, Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Dave Franco and Mark Ruffalo (but not Isla Fisher) are back, and they have a new, edgy magician with them, played by Lizzy Caplan. They are the “Horsemen” who had gone to ground after the last movie but now are bamboozled and chivvied and sort of zugzwanged into breaking cover for a new spectacular job at the behest of the creepy young billionaire played by a bearded Daniel Radcliffe. There are some nice moments when the gang outsmart their opponents, and an amusing if typically overextended sequence when our nimble-fingered heroes have to hide a single playing-card-sized circuit board from people trying to search them. But it’s sort of like Mission: Impossible without Tom Cruise. Or maybe they’re all Tom Cruise.
