The Now You See Me series is one that wants to be cooler than it actually is. Even with its initially intriguing hook of “Ocean’s Eleven with magic tricks”, those previous two films get lost in an ocean of cheap tricks and deeply nonsensical reveals. The long-awaited third installment, Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, is basically just more of the same, which will be great for fans but did not work for me at all.
In the ten years since the events of Now You See Me 2, the world-famous magicians/thieves, the Four Horsemen, have all gone their separate ways. In the meantime, a trio of young illusionists — Charlie (Justice Smith), June (Ariana Greenblatt) and Bosco (Dominic Sessa) — have taken up the Horsemen’s righteous crusade on their own, mimicking the Horsemen’s techniques (and likenesses via hologram) to steal from crypto scammers and redistribute the funds to the public.
One day, they get a visit from Horseman leader J. Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), who isn’t there to admonish them. Rather, he’s been tasked with recruiting the trio for a new, much bigger heist. The job: Stealing the Heart Diamond, a huge chunk of rock owned by South African CEO and criminal money launderer Veronika Vanderberg (Rosamund Pike). Sure enough, they’re joined by the rest of the original Horsemen—Jack Wilder (Dave Franco), Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson), and a returning Henley Reeves (Isla Fisher)–and the massive crew must combine their powers of trickery and illusion to take the billionaire down.
The Now You See Me films have long been compared to the Fast & Furious series in how they both operate as purely over-the-top, “turn your brain off”-style entertainment with large ensemble casts. However, Now You Don’t reminded me less of Fast & Furious and more of a similar legacy threequel in xXx: The Return of Xander Cage. Just like that film, Now You See Me: Now You Don’t spends an inordinate amount of time dedicated to having its “next generation” deify the original cast, talking ad nauseam about how great and cool they are.
“Now You See Me: Now You Don’t spends an inordinate amount of time dedicated to having its ‘next generation’ deify the original cast.”
Justice Smith’s Charlie, in particular, feels the need to state how obsessed he was with literally every returning character the moment they appear on screen. It becomes less of the characters sincerely believing that the Horsemen are the coolest and that they actually care for each other more than the film is desperately trying to convince you of that statement. The only character who isn’t immediately enamoured is Dominic Sessa’s Bosco, who butts heads with Atlas on multiple occasions. That being said, not even that feels genuine considering he can impersonate each member of the crew with near-perfect precision.
It doesn’t help that there isn’t much depth to any of the original characters to begin with, but that’s the problem that arises when director Ruben Fleischer — as well as co-writers Michael Lesslie, Seth Grahame-Smith and Zombieland scribes Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick — have to juggle over half a dozen different protagonists all wrestling for screentime. It’s no fault of the actors, who fall back into their roles with ease and do a decent job with the paper-thin material.
Jesse Eisenberg is still pure fast-talking snark as Atlas. Dave Franco and Woody Harrelson have decent comedic banter as Wilder and McKinney. It is nice to have Isla Fisher back in the fold; her charm was sorely missing in the second film due to her real-life pregnancy at the time. Morgan Freeman also makes a brief appearance as debunker/secret ally Thaddeus Bradley, but he’s barely around enough to make any kind of impact. On the other side, as great as Rosamund Pike typically is at playing villains, her menace here is constantly undercut by her distractingly bad attempt at a South African accent.
“The problem with Now You See Me: Now You Don’t is that, overall, the film feels as empty as the illusions the Horsemen craft.”
The problem with Now You See Me: Now You Don’t is that, overall, the film feels as empty as the illusions the Horsemen craft. They certainly are still as flashy as they’ve ever been, but I couldn’t care about any of it. There’s an extended sequence in a Parisian mansion where the two generations of magicians are all trying to one-up the other, which just became eye-rollingly dull the longer it went on. The best tricks in the film are ironically the smaller ones, like two characters using a cloth to magically switch places during a fight or a different fight scene playing around with the forced perspective of an Ames room.
To make another Fast & Furious comparison, the reason those films work better and Now You See Me doesn’t is that at no point do I feel a connection between most of these characters. As much as Vin Diesel constantly spouts about family, the bond still feels very real between them, and you’re invested in them as a result. On the other hand, while the Gen-Z illusionists recapture that feeling to an extent, The Horsemen’s friendship is about as insincere as a magician claiming that there’s nothing in their pockets.
If you’re a fan of the previous films, Now You See Me: Now You Don’t gives you everything you want out of another installment. There’s plenty of banter between its massive cast, the “magic” on display is suitably ridiculous, and of course, there’s the guaranteed verbose reveals and “aha” moments in the final act. If you aren’t a fan, there isn’t anything here that will change your mind.
I’ll likely forget I saw this faster than you can say “Abracadabra.”
