Summary
Now You See Me: Now You Don’t breathes some fresh energy into the franchise, but it hasn’t learned any new tricks in the last decade.
Magic requires a suspension of disbelief. You have to surrender yourself to the illusion. You know you’re being conned, but that’s the point, and if you interrogate the method too much, you’ll ruin the effect. Movies about magic require you to turn your brain off almost entirely, since there is no method. There is no craft. Every trick is brought to life by editing and visual effects. The illusion is all that remains. Now You See Me: Now You Don’t is an illusion of a good movie, and as long as you don’t think about it too much, you might happily let it pass as one until you inevitably forget you ever saw it.
On that subject: Do you remember Now You See Me? You’d be forgiven if you don’t. It was released in 2013 to middling reviews and a surprisingly hefty box office haul, and the sequel was about as good and did about as well. These days, any movie without the curb appeal of established IP is probably going to struggle, so the temptation to get the band back together is overwhelming. This third outing not only gets the band back together but adds a few new members, all fresh-faced and social media savvy and ready to take the reins.
They don’t quite manage that, though, but only because the old cast seems so excited to be back together. An opening scene set in a secret concert that is really a front to defraud an obnoxious crypto bro played by Andrew Santino handles all the reintroductions. There’s J. Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg, Zombieland: Double Tap), smug ringleader; Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson in a porkpie hat), hypnotist and mentalist; Jack Wilder (Dave Franco, The Studio), sleight-of-hand trickster and card shark; and Henley Reeves (Isla Fisher, Playdate, Jay Kelly), an escape artist who was replaced in the second movie by Lizzy Caplan.
But this is all a fakeout to introduce the new crew, a trio of Robin Hood-style millennial thieves: Bosco (Dominic Sessa), June (Ariana Greenblatt, Fear Street: Prom Queen), and Charlie (Justice Smith, Jurassic World: Dominion, Sharper). They’re breaking some copyright laws to project the images of the original Four Horsemen as part of their own scam, but they’re thrown for a loop when the real, non-hologram Atlas turns up at their hideout with a sales pitch. The Eye – a secret society to whom the Horsemen are sort of answerable – wants Atlas and the kids to pull off a heist that quickly comes to include all the other Horsemen and a few familiar faces besides. I won’t spoil, but maybe don’t look at the IMDb page if you’re worried about such things.
That heist involves relieving Veronika Vanderberg (Rosamund Pike, doing the most theatrically terrible South African accent ever committed to film) of a giant blood diamond. It’s a simple idea that has been rendered with needless complexity by the overstuffed screenwriting team of Seth Grahame-Smith, Michael Lesslie, Rhett Reese, and Paul Wernick. It’s one of those plots freestyled around a bunch of fun set-pieces that were clearly conceived first, one of which features a ridiculous French château in which every room is an elaborate trick, from a hall of mirrors to an impossible staircase.
This kind of thing strains that suspension of disbelief to breaking point. There’s a daft bit in the same château where the newbies have a trick-off with the old guard that is fun in theory, but in execution includes a quick-change that means Henley must have been wearing a different outfit under her regular clothes just on the off chance such a thing would happen. There’s loads of stuff like this, and when the pacing flags, which it sometimes does, you’re allowed to think about it too much. Now You See Me: Now You Don’t works best when you cut it a bit of slack. You just have to pretend the seams aren’t there.
Given how popular the first two movies were, it won’t surprise anyone if this turns out to be a banker. It even ends with a setup for the next one, just in case, but luckily doesn’t deprive audiences of payoff and a grand finale that includes a twist I genuinely didn’t predict (although perhaps only because I was starting to lose interest by then). Director Ruben Fleischer does a half-decent job with the set-pieces, and it’s worth checking out Pike’s memorably ridiculous villain. Just don’t expect anything resembling magic.
