After a ten-year hiatus, The Four Horsemen: Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), Merrit McKinney (Woody Harrelson), Jack Wilder (Dave Franco), and Henley Reeves (Ilsa Fisher), a troupe of injustice-fighting magicians return for a one-night only show at an underground New York venue.  Cut short when the police are called, they disperse only to find that they have been called back by The Eye for another benevolent heist. This time their ranks have been expanded to include amateur magicians Bosco Leroy (Dominic Sessa), June (Ariana Greenblatt), and Charlie (Justice Smith), and they are charged with bringing down Veronika Vanderberg (Rosamund Pike), a diamond heiress who uses her business to launder the money of high profiled war profiteers. 

Ruben Fleischer gets the team back together for Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, a (legacy?) sequel to the Now You See Me franchise launched in 2013 and spawning two prior titles.  He is working from a script penned by Seth Grahame-Smith, Michael Lesslie, and Rhett Reese who have no easy task of reviving a franchise, filling in the decade long gap between titles, and expanding the universe of the film.  Oddly enough, this title, from Lionsgate, despite the narrative weight it is saddled with, clocks in at only 112 minutes making it the shortest of the series so far. 

The film opens with the reunion trick in New York City, this time, targeting Brett Finnigan (Andrew Santino), the leader of a corrupt crypto scheme and redistributing the wealth to the people they shorted.  It serves audiences well enough as a quick rundown of who the Horsemen are after such a long time away from them, but the trick is rather muted as it returns funds to characters’ digital wallets.  They call up Bosco, and enter into him, possessing the young man and completing the trick through him.  More functional than interesting, it is incredibly effective at setting up the tone for the rest of the film; unfortunately, that tone includes clunky dialogue, and often times, even clunkier delivery. 

From there, the film pivots to South Africa to introduce us to Veronika.  Pike is having a blast chewing up the scenery and acting with such broad affectations to overtake her scene partners who are deliberately downplaying their own roles all in service of the film.  She has the freedom to go broad, and as such delivers a much needed jolt of energy to a film otherwise bogged down by an ensemble cast that seems strangely afraid to wrestle control of the scene from the antagonist safe for the late reintroduction of Lula (Lizzy Caplan) who enters in a frenzy ready to match Pike’s freak.  Had the Horsemen and their new band of tag-along acolytes had stronger chemistry, the middle act of the film would have had a bit more punch about it, but this drag can also be attributed more towards the script which insists of a team of eight in a story and runtime that just is not equipped to handle that many characters. 

While the opening action of the middle act is a bit on the slower side, the location – the Chateau de Roussillon, headquarters of The Eye in rural France – is a real delight, albeit ill utilized.  Now, to be fair, George Richmond’s cinematography here is utilized quite well across the various trick rooms that the team must investigate for clues as to why they were called by The Eye to perform a diamond heist, but once the police arrive and the team again splits up back to the rooms, we see the same bag of tricks deployed in such close proximity to their introduction that the excitement is dampened.  It is not without merit, though, and what makes this sequence exciting is that it is one of the few times the tricks seem both magic and practical without relying too heavily on technology.  There are some instances where effects are brought in, such as the room that can pivot on an axis, but that is technology utilized in the filmmaking more so than the storytelling.  Much of the issue with the Now You See Me franchise is that as each heist grows bigger and bigger, the tricks become more and more elaborate, requiring more technology instead of actual illusion or slight of hand.  It is just a shame then that one of the major sequences where “practical magic” is utilized is also one of the times across the scope of the film that the narrative feels like it is circling back on itself as it tries to recalibrate for the next act. 

As with the other films, the finale keeps audiences mostly in the dark of the details of the trick, only knowing what the final outcome is supposed to be but not privy to the finer details of how the Horsemen plan to pull off their trick.  The narrative finds the Horsemen in Abu Dhabi where Veronika unveils her new Formula 1 racecar at an exclusive gala.  The individual set pieces are a lot of fun, though the pacing does drag when the action pivots to Bosco behind the wheel of the car delivering a litany of ADR lines, none of which seem to land nor do they fit the overall tone that film takes in so far as humor is concerned.  The handicapping of Sessa, here, is almost criminal because next to Eisenberg, he brings the perfectly calibrated energy to this not-too-serious franchise. When he is allowed to be on screen, he hits his mark and his timing with great accuracy, but from the sound booth and added in post, it feels like desperate ramping by the screenwriters padding the runtime unnecessarily with quippy one liners that are not even all that clever. This finale is also where the sheer size of the ensemble becomes most unwieldy, and while the narrative does ultimately reveal traceable logic behind certain characters’ extended absences, it feels odd as we watch this unfold with a quarter of the team missing and another half confined to a single location separated from the main action. 

Now You See Me: Now You Don’t is a serviceable action/heist film and a pretty well employed sequel reviving an otherwise languishing franchise.  It walks the line well of bringing the timbre of this now decade old story and updating it to current audiences, though the scriptwriting team had the unfortunate benefit that the have and have not gap has only widened exponentially since the last time the Horsemen pulled off a Robinhood inspired heist.  It falls into the same traps of its predecessors where the larger illusions rely far too much on technology than actual slight of hand, but those set pieces are never too absurd to turn off audiences and the reveal of the trick does track so that we do not feel like we are the butt of the joke.  Ending in such a way that more cleanly sets up an eventual fourth entry, the series has the benefit that each entry can pretty easily be made its own standalone heist, however the weight of the lore is already starting to be felt on this third installment.  In this way, it is like a goofy, younger cousin to James Bond, especially in this entry given Pike’s over the top villainy. Thankfully, though, like the best of the Bond films, it is still breezy fun, and with just a little more refinement in the dialogue, it could have been a great fall blockbuster that breathed new life into the franchise.  The marketing push was too soft to be a simple cash grab on behalf of the studio, and on the page it does seem to have carefully fostered from the ideation to the page for fans who may still remember with fondness growing up with these easy-to-watch popcorn selling schemes.  With a cast that all seems excited to be back together once the characters are allowed to warm up after their hiatus, that chemistry eventually wins us over to following the Horsemen once again; perhaps their greatest trick yet.