I’d say it’s some kind of magic trick that has allowed the Now You See Me movies to have sustained enough of a fandom to complete a trilogy of films over the course of 12 years, but that may imply there’s some kind of clever dexterity happening behind the scenes of the films’ production. Suffice to say, there’s not much magic to be found within this gaudy franchise where seemingly gimmicky magicians—who often actually seem to have genuine preternatural abilities beyond human comprehension—pull off impossible tricks set around heists and schemes meant to combat a world of greed and injustice. But there is certainly a sense of underhanded trickery in these movies selling themselves as anything other than barebones, lifeless blockbusters promising more to audiences than they can ultimately provide.
True to form, and just like a lot of amateur magicians, Now You See Me: Now You Don’t (somehow still failing at the obvious sequel designation by not simply committing to the back part of that title) delivers on little more than cheap stunts with obvious seams, asking for polite applause despite failing to amaze its audience. Maybe more insulting than the fact that these films have had three chances to get their act together is that this is what the franchise delivers nearly ten years following the last entry.
At the very least, the world of Now You See Me, now helmed by director Ruben Fleischer (most recently of Uncharted shame, but also reuniting with Jesse Eisenberg and Woody Harrelson after both Zombieland movies) along with a foreboding team of four writers, is able to conjure a fantasy world where anything is possible. That tone is set immediately, when we find out the Four Horseman—our central cabal of magic Gods, for those unfamiliar—are reuniting for a one-night-only show after ten years apart, which fills up a warehouse in Bushwick with hip, tapped-in magic fans. Though, in today’s world where blatant corruption by the affluent is systemic and not only goes unpunished but is often actively rewarded, perhaps they’re more admirers of the Robin Hood act that the Horsemen define themselves by, typically utilizing their act to take the wealthy down a peg and give back to everyday folks. These are magicians for the common man.
Appropriately, this act was all a ruse to swipe funds out of a local crypto influencer’s bank account after he tricked followers into a rug-pull. But when he moves to confront the group, he finds this was on top of another ruse, and that the entities on stage were projected deepfakes of the Horsemen created by the three novice magicians actually running the show: Charlie (Justice Smith), Bosco (Dominic Sessa), and June (Ariana Greenblatt). Satisfied with their successful gambit, the three return to their hideout, where a very-much-not-a-projection Daniel Atlas (Eisenberg) is waiting for them, smugly discerning of the group in that neurotic Eisenberg-y way, but impressed and arriving with a call to action: a mission from the larger clandestine magician alliance known as The Eye (quite frankly, too much to get into right now) that involves this new fresh blood.
The group sets off to Africa to contend with Veronika Vanderberg (Rosamund Pike), a high-profile multi-sector business magnate and diamond merchant, presumed to be using her business as a front for money laundering. Once the rest of the team shows up on the scene to help the group out of a sticky situation—Harrelson, Dave Franco, and Isla Fisher, the latter returning after sitting out from Now You See Me 2—you’ve got the basic setup for yet another entry of a dull, complacently convoluted globetrotting action series that fails to ever truly capitalize on turning its magicians-doing-espionage conceit into anything distinct from your garden variety cash-in franchise movie.
What Now You See Me: Now You Don’t delivers is a woefully lazy reignition that sands down any of its faintly charming edges into vapidly sinuous twists of a supposedly surprising mystery. These movies may be known for their outlandish sense of reality and preposterous plot twists, which surely would be fun in any other context, but Fleischer and company are never able to lift things out of the dumps of studio movie homogeneity. It’s telling that this third entry, which reintroduces audiences to ostensibly franchise-favorite characters after years away, can’t convey with any affectivity why one should care that any of them are back together again.
That’s because, as much as this ensemble may try, there’s just no meat on the bone as far as any of these people as actual characters. They are mechanisms to carry a movie that prioritizes plot but forgets to write an interesting one. Everyone fulfills an archetype: Eisenberg is his neurotic egoist self, Harrelson is an older crank, Fisher is the cooler head, and Franco is… a guy that can throw playing cards like ninja stars. The younger cast has no difficulty holding their own because everyone is carrying exactly zero weight. While it’s nice in particular to see Sessa get his next real shot at fulfilling his potential following his breakthrough in The Holdovers, this couldn’t be a more diametrically opposed role, given its lack of the same sort of rich emotion or depth. Lizzy Caplan and Morgan Freeman make returns as well, and can’t augment the weightless energy of a movie that desperately seeks any form of substance from assembling all its characters together like a Marvel movie.
Not that we need to call for the Now You See Me films to carry such gravitas, but it would be nice to have something even a little bit fun to hold onto. But even the set pieces here are derivative and expected—in constantly mimicking the magician’s rule of misdirection, you can dependably trust that the movie is doing something off-screen that it will show you in due time to explain away the seeming impossibility of the feat. The film’s one relatively inspired sequence—a fight and escape from the police in a mansion that hosts numerous magic gimmick rooms, like a forced-perspective space and a house of mirrors—is too brief to truly excite.
More than anything else, it always feels like these characters can get away with anything, nullifying any excitement or stakes, because ultimately they’re just putting on a charade for astoundingly oblivious people. To some degree, maybe that speaks to some of the design of actual magic tricks. But really, in practice, it feels completely disassociated from any type of consistent sense of rules that these magicians have to follow, making this a trilogy of stale carnival acts. Better versions of these movies would lean more into the potential cunning of real-world magic, or at least the inanity that’s inherent to this franchise’s existence. Instead, Now You See Me: Now You Don’t stays arduously true to an old bag of tricks that have long run out of novelty.
Lionsgate will release Now You See My: Now You Don’t only in theaters on November 14.
