(1.5 stars)The Now You See Me film franchise offers a flamboyant indictment of greed. Its main characters, a team of celebrated illusionists known to audiences as the Four Horsemen, put on elaborate productions that involve stealing money from unscrupulous sorts — bankers, crypto bros, etc. — and showering their adoring fans with the bills.
The Now You See Me film franchise offers a flamboyant indictment of greed. Its main characters, a team of celebrated illusionists known to audiences as the Four Horsemen, put on elaborate productions that involve stealing money from unscrupulous sorts — bankers, crypto bros, etc. — and showering their adoring fans with the bills.
Which makes it kind of funny that by the third installment, “Now You See Me: Now You Don’t,” these movies are starting to feel like a cash grab. (The first two made more than $300 million each, well surpassing their respective budgets.) The Horsemen’s high jinks, while entertaining in the moment, wind up being forgettable. Their character arcs, too, disappear from memory as soon as the credits roll, a most unfortunate vanishing act.
The latest film complicates an already convoluted narrative. It introduces a trio of young illusionists — cocky front man Bosco Leroy (Dominic Sessa), eager lockpick June (Ariana Greenblatt) and behind-the-scenes mastermind Charlie (Justice Smith) — who join the Horseman to stage a diamond heist targeting a major South African crime syndicate led by the elegantly icy Veronika Vanderberg (Rosamund Pike).
That means we have three more heroes to monitor beyond the people we already know: arrogant leader J. Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), laid-back hypnotist Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson), unassuming card trickster Jack Wilder (Dave Franco) and nimble escape artist Henley Reeves (Isla Fisher), working together for the first time in a decade after personal differences drove them to break up. There are a couple of returning players whose appearances I won’t spoil, though you can probably guess who they are (if you remember a movie from nine years ago, that is).
The ragtag crew is instructed to steal Veronika Vanderberg’s fancy diamond by the Eye, a secret society of magicians led in the previous film by Thaddeus Bradley (Morgan Freeman, who briefly shows up in this one for old times’ sake). Sure! The plot beyond that is tedious to describe and ultimately irrelevant, as Veronika Vanderberg — a first-name, last-name type of person — and her precious jewel serve as a thinly written excuse for our beloved Horsemen to kiss and make up after all that time spent apart.
To her credit, Pike delivers a delicious performance, playing a morally bankrupt diva not unlike her character in 2023’s “Saltburn.” She wears Veronika Vanderberg’s South African accent like a showy piece of jewelry. The remainder of the screen time is divvied up seven ways, which doesn’t allow much room for the others to shine — though it is amusing to see Sessa, known for his breakout turn in 2023’s “The Holdovers,” step into the precocious know-it-all role that Eisenberg embodied so well earlier in his career.
With certain genres, it doesn’t matter when the plot mechanics barely make any sense. The whole point is getting to see popular actors run around together; when they have fun, the audience does, too. But the thrill of stage magic in particular relies on the successful revelation of its intricate mapping. Director Ruben Fleischer (“Zombieland”), who is new to the franchise, and an army of also-new screenwriters rolling as deep as the Horsemen — Seth Grahame-Smith, Michael Lesslie, Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese, working off a story by Eric Warren Singer — fail in this regard.
Although Fleischer pulls a few clever tricks, such as when his camera angles work to deceive viewers alongside the handful of French policemen chasing the Horsemen through Thaddeus’s eccentrically designed mansion, most of the film is underwhelming. Its visuals are bland and the writing disappointing — especially when it comes to the crown jewel of these movies, the Horsemen’s stage shows. Their illusions are supposed to seem implausible only until their true workings are revealed. But they remain far-fetched here even after explanation, cheating the audience of that promised satisfaction.
So, really, there is no point to “Now You See Me: Now You Don’t” beyond fleeting awe at a diamond seeming to disappear. It becomes clear by the end that this is a filler chapter in the series, a bridge from its 2016 predecessor to an inevitable sequel starring the young trio and whichever of the original cast members bother to show up. The Horsemen do love swiping money, after all. This paycheck fits the bill.
PG-13. At area theaters. Contains strong language, violence and suggestive references. 112 minutes.
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