‘Now You See Me: Now You Don’t’ Review: Smoke, Mirrors, and Nothing Beneath

“You found this little soiree because you wanted to be fooled!” boasts magician extraordinaire J. Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg) to the enthusiastic fans who followed a series of clues to find the secret show of the newly reunited Four Horsemen. But he might as well be talking directly (or is it down?) to Now You See Me: Now You Don’t’s audience, who the filmmakers assume are as eager to lap up another slew of arbitrary cinematic illusions as they were nearly a decade ago when Now You See Me 2 was released.

The third film in the series reliably delivers on the promise of both flamboyant showmanship and a steadfast refusal to adhere to more than just the rules of physics. Not long into the film, we learn that the Atlas we saw on stage—alongside his old cohorts Merritt (Woody Harrelson), Jack (Dave Franco), and Henley (Isla Fisher)—was an illusion constructed by young upstart magician Bosco (Dominic Sessa) and his two pals, Charlie (Justice Smith) and June (Ariana Greenblatt). It’s just the first of many patently absurd illusions that rely neither on ingenuity nor sleight of hand, but CGI trickery that leaves them feeling weightless and frivolous.

As with its predecessors, Now You See Me: Now You Don’t is completely uninterested in convincing its audience that any of the Four Horsemen’s bombastic tricks could ever be accomplished by any actual human being. But that doesn’t stop Ruben Fleischer’s film from parading out each of the magicians to deliver one monologue after another explaining the preposterous and convoluted intricacies of how they crafted their illusions.

The audiences within the film are never less than enraptured, as much by the tricks as by how they were pulled off. But most of us on the other side of the screen will find these tricks to be tiresome, as the Four Horsemen’s abilities resemble less those of magicians than superheroes.

Now You See Me 2 made the mistake of throwing more characters into its story, leading to various convolutions of plot, and Now You See Me: Now You Don’t follows suit. It not only adds the three new, younger members to the Four Horsemen, but it sees both Henley (Isla Fisher) and Lula (Lizzy Caplan), the former’s de facto replacement in the second film, return as well. This creates a need for every character to show off their unique skill set, resulting in a plot that must shoehorn in an instance of each of these eight master magicians proving their worth.

The plot is reliably one big MacGuffin leading to the thwarting of a cartoonish villain. Here, the big bad is the icy head of a diamond mining company, Veronika Vanderberg, played by Rosamund Pike, whose South African accent is perhaps aptly a display of now-you-hear-it-now-you-don’t. And as the gang rolls out another bag of tricks to steal an enormous blood diamond from Vanderberg, it’s hard not to grow as indifferent to them as she often is. Despite what Atlas said earlier on, we’re not so much fooled by any of the false illusions that the Four Horsemen trot out as we are by expecting there to be anything of substance behind the curtain.