After nearly a decade, the new Now You See Me film is finally here. After years of speculation and various reports of new writers and directors, the third film has officially reappeared on the silver screen for your enjoyment – if corny adventure comedies are your thing.
For those unfamiliar, the Now You See Me franchise follows the daring heists and travels of an anti-capitalist Robin Hood-like magic collective called the Horsemen. There’s arrogant leader and illusionist J. Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), mentalist Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson), escape artist and former assistant Henley Reeves (Isla Fisher), and pickpocket and slight of hand aficionado Jack Wilder (Dave Franco). In the second film, Henley left to start a family and Lula May (Lizzy Caplan), a master of disguise. While they spend most of their time robbing the rich to give to the poor, they take most of their orders from a secret organization called The Eye. In Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, the team is called back together after a group of twenty-something amateurs (Justice Smith, Dominic Sessa, Ariana Greenblatt) use their identities to steal from a crypto-bro. Intrigued by one another, the two groups team up to take down a corrupt mining CEO (Rosamund Pike) and steal her precious heart diamond.
This new film is corny. I remember the past films leaning into comedy and the excitement of its premise but this film lost me. The writing is cliché and predictable and some of the line deliveries, especially from Eisenberg, Fisher and Dominic Sessa feel straight out of a Disney Channel movie.
Now You See Me: Now You Don’t seems to operate from a place of unearned nostalgia. This doesn’t have the same fan base as say, Tron, Alien, or Kingsmen, all of which had sequels or spinoffs in the last couple of years. Director Ruben Fleischer adds these sentimental beats after an emotional or comedic moment where it’s like he expects the audience to say “aww”. The movie is good for what it is: a mindless popcorn movie. It doesn’t need to be more than that.
Now You See Me: Now You Don’t benefits from the long gap in between films. A lot of the lore from the previous films falls away in this new story allowing unfamiliar audiences to easily latch on. In some ways, this film feels a like reintroduction, reestablishing the franchise’s core characters and their relationships while incorporating three new characters.
Worth noting is that this third installment is with an entirely new filmmaking team. Jon M. Chu, who directed the last one back in 2016, has spent the last two years working on a very different magical franchise (Wicked: For Good premieres later this month). Ed Solomon, who co-wrote the first film and wrote the second, is completely absent from this one. This could be positive or negative as having few ties to the previous two films allows the new filmmakers to shake off the cobwebs of what’s not working. However, Now You See Me: Now You Don’t lacks the heart it so desperately thinks it has and that is a problem for new and old fans alike.
Now You See Me: Now you Don’t is now in theaters. Watch the trailer below.
