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Now You See Me: Now You Don’t (now you see it Starz, in addition to VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) is the third in a series of films that are low-key on track to comprise a billion-dollar franchise. It’s almost as if these movies about brilliant magicians pulling high-stakes Robin Hood-style heists engage in a bit of sleight-of-hand, distracting us over here while its other hand sneaks a 20 outta your wallet. Nine years since Now You See Me 2 vanished from your memory (and $335 million in ticket sales), Now You Don’t popped out of a mirror or a trapdoor or whatever, reintroducing us to the Jesse Eisenberg-led legacy cast – and a trio of newcomers – for another ridiculous caper featuring new director Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland, Venom) and quietly snatching $213 million at the worldwide box office. And now we’re here to determine if it’s worth killing a couple hours of your life, or if you’ll just want to Now You See flee.
The Gist: Meet the newbs: Bosco (Dominic Sessa) is a talented impressionist. June (Ariana Greenblatt) is a pickpocket and lockpick who can – perform? Pull off? Do? Do – parkour. Charlie (Justice Smith) is a smart guy who concocts elaborate magic tricks and is a walking encyclopedia of illusionist trivia and history, which might come in handy should anyone need this thing in front of them or that thing that just happened explained in detail. Charlie does that a lot. He also fawns over his hero magicians when he meets them, and he gets that opportunity when J. Daniel Atlas (Eisenberg) manifests in the trio’s secret-but-obviously-not-so-secret apartment to recruit them for a job. Abracadabra, beeyotches.
Atlas, as you may recall, did a bunch of cool shit with his group the Four Horsemen in two movies, which involves pulling off elaborate tricks and then participating in snappy flashbacks explaining how they did it. Then they kinda split up or retired. So it goes. But Atlas has a new gig assigned to him by the shadowy benevolent secret-society magician overlords known as The Eye, and he needs some fresh blood. Charlie, Bosco and June will do just nicely. Their gig? Cripple Veronika Vanderberg (Rosamund Pike), the head of a skeezy South African diamond mine that’s also a front for criminal money laundering, by stealing her half-billion-dollar gem of all gems, the Heart Diamond, which is shaped like a heart (duh) and about the size of a small softball, so let’s just say it’s baseball-sized. Perhaps there’s an easier and less shady and more legal way to take her down, but very righteous and clever sneakiness has worked for two movies now, and it’s more entertaining, so here we are.
Just when we’re about to relabel the group Atlas’s Four, it turns out that his old Four Horsemen pals were summoned to the project without his knowing. So poof, here’s his reunion with mentalist Merritt (Woody Harrelson), escape artist Henley (Isla Fisher) and card barracuda Jack (Dave Franco), so now we’re at Atlas’s Seven, or maybe the Four Plus Three Horsemen. If you think it’s getting crowded in here, we haven’t even gotten to the sorta-surprise bit parts and cameos, but I’m gonna stop there and say the cat bumped into me while passing in the kitchen and I was halfway through the dining room when I realized he took my tongue.
Together, this conglomeration of tricksters does some things for some reasons (I’m not avoiding spoilers, I’m just disinterested), including visiting a mansion-slash-museum-of-magic that includes a spinning room, a forced-perspective room, a mirror room and an Escher-esque room, which might come in handy if anyone should try to capture them and they need a creative set piece in order to escape or fight back. Meanwhile, Veronika seethes like Skeletor or Gargamel, take your pick. Will the One Two Three Four Five Six Seven Or More Horsemen pull off this doozy? A magician never tells, even though that’s a key component of these movies!
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? The Now You See Mes are like The Prestige with its head full of helium, crossed with the Ocean’s Eleven series. This one specifically rips off one of the niftiest sequences from Inception.
Performance Worth Watching: Watching Rosamund Pike chew scenery is pretty enjoyable. But watching Rosamund Pike chew scenery with a highly unpredictable Franco-Porto-Germano-Swedish-Hungarianish-British-by-way-of-South Africa Whatever Who Cares accent? That’s something else entirely.
Sex And Skin: Now sit back and watch as nobody’s clothes disappear!
Our Take: It’s debatable whether or not Now You See Me 3 is a case of diminishing returns, but it adds on to a reliably entertaining-enough franchise that feels designed to be basic cable comfort food – comfortable, familiar and unapologetically escapist. Nobody sits down in front of these demanding anything more than disposable entertainment, and Fleischer’s film fulfills that expectation, no more, no less. I’m tempted to say it’s ABOUT something more than that, that it’s ABOUT questioning everything you see because not everything you see is true, but that type of undisciplined skepticism might get me tossed on the wacko pile with the Flat Earthers and 9/11 Was An Inside Jobbers.
Some may claim that the film thinks it’s so very clever and pats itself on the back with every big reveal of what just happened in the previous muy muy tricksy sequence, but I beg to differ. I assert that it’s well aware how dopey this shit is, since Fleischer cultivates a tone that’s an eyelash’s-breadth away from Sessa jumping out of the screen to jam an elbow in our ribs. There’s no other way to logically justify the obnoxious banter and instances where the plot grinds to a halt so the characters can perform friendly-competitive one-upsmanship magic tricks that should take significant setup but are nonetheless pulled off spontaneously. THAT’S HOW GOOD THEY ARE! THEY ARE SO GOOD AT THIS! JEENYUSES!
Since the negging snowball is rolling, I’ll keep piling on: The action sequences are choppy mediocrities, the performances are elevated unto cartoonishness (although Eisenberg is the calmest member of the cast, and has publicly said he enjoys doing these films, I kinda want to airlift him into a project more worthy of his knotty eccentricities) and the plot is no friend of scrutiny, enough so, critical thinking should be banished from the county during the duration of the run time. There are far worse things to watch than this unabashedly silly squandering of talent. Take it or leave it, I don’t care.
Our Call: Now you see me recommend this movie: now you don’t. Fooled ya! SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.
Photo: Lionsgate/Everett Collection
Photo: Katalin Vermes / © Lionsgate /Courtesy Everett Collection
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