Now You See Me: Now You Don't Review – Absurd Third Sequel Is Nothing But An Illusion Of Entertainment

Well, the Horsemen are back to their old tricks… again. Depending on your taste for cheese and tolerance for being condescended to, the film is either a welcome return to preposterous fun or an investigation into just how far back you can roll your eyes.

Now You See Me: Now You Don’tis like Avengers: Endgame for the magic and heist hybrid crowd, which is to say, it features all the big Rube Goldberg-machine set pieces you’ve come to expect but with the levels of illogic dialed up. If Now You See Me has become somewhat notorious for its asinine ending twist, then Now You Don’t makes both of its predecessors seem like grounded chamber dramas.

Perhaps that sounds like good fun at the Pop Cinema, and you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. Helmed this time by Ruben Fleischer, whose work on Venom and the Zombieland films proves a director with much greater facility in balancing humor and action than either Jon M. Chu or Louis Leterrier, Now You Don’t at least seems more self-aware. Rosamund Pike, who plays the mustache-twirling, diamond-mining billionaire villain Veronika Vanderburg (with a questionable South African dialect), calls out the cornball aesthetic of the Horsemen’s magic on multiple occasions. The film feels more like Adam West’s Batman than Christopher Nolan’s.

Now You See Me: Now You Don’t Reveals Nothing Behind Its Smoke & Mirrors

But it still stretches suspension of disbelief to its maximum, with several magic tricks dependent on the audience foregoing all critical thought, not to mention an absurdly high number of confluences to make it all work. It has been ten years since J. Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg) and his comrades were seen together as the Horsemen, until they announce a sudden, one-night reunion show in Bushwick. In multiple sleight-of-hands and misdirects, Atlas, mentalist Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson), cardistry expert Jack Wilder (Dave Franco), and escape artist Henley Reeves (Isla Fisher), steal a mountain of crypto money from an unsuspecting audience member and redistribute it to the crowd.

Except that it’s all a bunch of smoke and mirrors. This was actually an elaborate illusion by three Gen Z magicians-in-waiting pretending to be them, whose adoration of the Four Horsemen and their altruistic, Robin Hood-esque escapades have inspired a new generation. Brainiac and architect Charlie (Justice Smith), shape-shifter Bosco (Dominic Sessa), and locksmith June (Ariana Greenblatt) think they have gotten away with something extraordinary until the real Atlas shows up in their loft space to both confront and recruit them. The Eye, the mysterious (and nonsensical) magic-based spy organization, has summoned Atlas out of hiding to find this new generation and await orders in Antwerp, Belgium.

It isn’t long before Merritt, Jack, and Henley appear and this band goes from four to seven. Or eight, if you include Thaddeus (Morgan Freeman). Or ten, if you include some surprises. Like The Fast and the Furious franchise, these films have started to perpetuate themselves by taking past villains and, somehow, turning them into colleagues. The group’s mission is to expose Pike’s Vanderburg character as the Nazi descendant she is.

Pike is luminous as always, just a real shot in the arm for an otherwise lazily made and performed film. On paper, the character is as if Elon Musk were somehow even more brash about his proclivities, and yet Pike makes you love her nonetheless. Harrelson is delightful, but for the most part, everyone seems to be wading through the film’s credit card commercial aesthetic with weighted shoes. Speaking of commercials, this thing is swimming in obvious product placement, from the Abu Dhabi tourism board to a certain canned drink getting an entire final scene all to itself.

This is a big-budget film with an A-list cast made by massive studios, and yet, in spite of all that’s obvious, the franchise continues to co-opt progressive language in order to sell its product. Not incorrectly, Vanderburg rails against the Horsemen to the press by calling them “entertainers masquerading as anti-capitalists,” which is a pretty solid and accurate indictment of both her adversaries and the filmmakers themselves. The film perpetuates a fantastical idea about class warfare: that it can be waged by a handful of exceptionally gifted people, and that all it takes to move society forward is to make powerful people look silly. It is a film designed in a lab to make you pat yourself on the back as you munch on your popcorn.

Written once again by Boaz Yakin and Edward Ricourt, one can’t say it doesn’t delight in its own trickery. The actual plot of the film probably only takes up at least 30 minutes of the nearly two-hour runtime, with the remainder devoted to convoluted scenarios that give way to more illusions. The movie certainly looks nice, but Brian Tyler is back to compose the score, and there is no shortage of ham-fisted stings up his sleeve to overwhelm nearly any moment. With its sugary optimism, this is a film both aesthetically and spiritually stuck in the era in which it was made.

With most tricks predicated on making us feel like fools, the film fundamentally misunderstands its own premise. It’s a movie about magic, yet none actually exists. Perhaps Now You Don’t isn’t the first sequel to rely on nostalgia to emanate its false warmth, but it might be the most condescending in its assumption of how little brain power you’re supposed to use to make it work. Early on, Atlas gets a call from The Eye via a phone number simply listed as “2010,” and that might be a cheeky reference, but it also seems like an inadvertent dig at itself. 2010 called, it wants its movie back.