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If Steven Soderbergh’s remake of Ocean’s Eleven attempted to capture some remnant of an older Las Vegas, sounding an elegiac note in its scene of the crew departing the Bellagio fountains one by one, then the Now You See Me series seems to aspire to something closer to the Las Vegas of today. The belated third entry Now You See Me: Now You Don’t swells the ranks of its tricky magician thieves to nearly Ocean’s Eleven numbers, then winds them through a heist plot that ultimately has the illusory spontaneity of a pop artist in the midst of a 30-show residency. It’s glitzy, fun fakery that fades quickly unless you’re an inexplicably hardcore fan.
Those fans will recall that it’s been nearly a decade since the most recent adventures of ringleader Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), mentalist Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson), card trickster Jack Wilder (Dave Franco), and escape artist Henley Reeves (Isla Fisher) at the behest of The Eye, a secret magician society that sends particularly skilled illusionists on righteous, spy-like missions. Actually, it’s been even longer for Henley, who wasn’t in the 2016 sequel unforgivably titled Now You See Me 2, apparently saving its more obvious moniker for this three-quel (and therefore squandering the opportunity to call the new one Now You Three Me). But the estranged quartet calling themselves the Four Horsemen are tricked into a testy reunion when a message from The Eye brings Atlas to the doorstep of a younger trio of similarly gifted magicians: Bosco (Dominic Sessa), June (Ariana Greenblatt), and Charlie (Justice Smith). Their task: steal an enormous diamond from money-laundering arms dealer Veronika Vanderberg (Rosamund Pike), a mission mostly in sync with the new kids’ proclivity for wealth redistribution, albeit more neatly traditional in its choice of evildoer.
So Pike brings the star count to eight; a few other familiar faces that may or may not nudge the movie’s ensemble close to a Soderberghian near-dozen of stars. Now You See Me: Now You Don’t could use a Soderbergh-like touch behind the camera, someone with a flair for pulling off scams so sly and presentationally appealing that their absurdities may as well be actual magic. Instead, it has director Ruben Fleischer, an Eisenberg pal from two Zombielands who also made the weightless smashes Venom and Uncharted. In other words, someone about as good as his material allows. As in the previous Now You See Mes, the film-makers (include a small army of credited screenwriters) prefer nudges and excited backslapping to sly winks. This means that the mechanics of the broader heists are ultimately explained, however unconvincingly, while smaller tricks that are supposed to testify to the Four/Eight/However Many Horsemen’s more specific skill sets might as well emanate from the Fantastic Four. (How does everyone arrive at a mysterious safe house already prepared to outdo each other in an impromptu magic-off?)
That’s the real perpetual danger of a Now You See Me movie: that the charmingly silly idea of magicians using their illusions to pull off elaborate heists will become overblown into its own Fast & Furious/Mission: Impossible/any given superhero saga. Forced into comparison with the best of any of those, it’s pretty low-rent stuff. Thankfully, the actors seem specifically delighted to be in a series that doesn’t require a lot of fake gravitas, just straight-enough faces when someone intones that in these troubling times, we need magic more than ever. Eisenberg probably deserves an award for making it through usable takes without a cutting remark – at least about the movie at hand. Atlas remains a good vehicle for his smarter-than-the-room prickliness, even when the room is demonstrably dumb.
The movie’s mild attempts at generation-gap clashes don’t really land; at one point, Merritt chides a younger for a blasé, inexpressive word choice, but in what universe would a Woody Harrelson character blanch at use of “bummer”? Thankfully, there’s not too much of this three-way X-Y-Z battle – could be fun, but if you’re going to do it, do it right – and the newbies, especially pint-sized Greenblatt in a police-station fight scene, are just as likable as the veterans. Maybe that’s because Now You See Me: Now You Don’t still has newbie energy itself. Despite the franchise being nearly old enough for a legacy sequel, there’s a light musicality to its various feats of showmanship that makes it feel like a scrappy upstart. So does the perpetual feeling that it might disappear in a puff of smoke.
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Now You See Me: Now You Don’t is released in cinemas on 14 November
