Hit-of-the-week popcorn movies are all about escapism, but they’re almost never about play. That’s the appeal of the “Now You See Me” films. They’ve got elements of action and crime and snarky screwball teamwork, but they’re like the “Fast and Furious” films with the speedy car chases replaced by sleight-of-hand deception. They’re hybrid magic-trick genre movies that entertain you by making your eyes widen a bit, the way a good magician does. They indulge in the play of playing you.
The third and latest entry in the series, “Now You See Me: Now You Don’t,” fools us for a while into thinking it’s a heist movie, as our trusty team of flimflam conjurers, the Four Horsemen, are joined by three next-generation illusionists — wouldn’t you know it, they’re social-activist magicians! — to steal the largest diamond in the world, a fist-size chunk of ice known as the Heart Diamond. It belongs to Veronika van der Berg (Rosamund Pike), a rapacious South African magnate whose family built its diamond empire on the back of that giant stone.
One of the things that’s slightly cheesy about the “Now You See Me” movies, in a highly likable way, is that you can practically hear the pitch meeting they came out of in which someone said, “Let’s cross ‘The Prestige’ with the ‘Ocean’s’ films and a dash of ‘Magic: Impossible’!” But the pleasurable thing about the “NYSM” movies is that you can never totally pin down where they’re going. They always pull the ground out from under the rug out from under the audience. And while it may be true that a good magician never reveals his tricks, the “Now You See Me” movies always reveal their tricks, in a way that only makes them seem trickier.
“Now You See Me: Now You Don’t” opens with the Four Horseman staging a 10-year reunion show in a warehouse in Bushwick, Brooklyn. As each of them appears on stage, only to get sucked like ghosts into the body of a volunteer, we’re like, “What is happening? Are they practicing real live magic now?” That’s the gullibility these movies tap into — our desire, underneath it all, to believe the impossible.
In this case, the Four Horsemen were never even there. They were conjured, via hologram, by their fannish Gen-Z inheritors: Bosco (Dominic Sessa), June (Ariana Greenblatt), and Charlie (Justice Smith), who want to use magic to make the world a better place; that’s why their show ends with the unmasking of a crypto hustler, and the spreading of his stolen wealth to the bank accounts of everyone there. As much as the younger three revere the older four, “Now You See Me: Now You Don’t” uses its expanded team of con-artist illusionists to build on the puckishly aggro spirit of the series. They’re all working together, but the film can barely get two magicians in the same room without setting off abrasive sparks of rivalry, which now takes the form of generational razzing.
In “Now You See Me: Now You Don’t,” that quick-draw tension is incarnated by Jesse Eisenberg’s performance as J. Daniel Atlas, the leader of the Four Horseman. Yes, we’re used to seeing him take the piss out of Woody Harrelson’s Merritt McKinney, the snarky mentalist in a pork-pie hat. But I don’t recall Eisenberg giving a performance this domineering in “Now You See Me” (2013) or “Now You See Me 2” (2016). It’s been nine years since that last installment, and from the moment Daniel arrives, in the flattened hair that flatters him, Eisenberg is verbally locked and loaded, ramping up the one-upmanship, tossing the direct-gaze insults, keeping each encounter wired. (There’s a great bit where he tells Veronika that convincing the world it needed to buy diamonds was the ultimate magic trick.) It might be an overstatement to say that Eisenberg is at his most commanding when he plays a-holes, but his presence in “Now You See Me: Now You Don’t” is gripping the way it was in “The Social Network.” He’s like Danny Ocean reborn as a terse megalomaniac of illusion.
He shows up in the hipster headquarters of the younger three, ready to recruit them for a mission masterminded by the Eye, the shadowy overseer who’s the “NYSM” equivalent of MI6 or S.H.I.E.L.D. or the High Table. The magicians are ordered to go to Antwerp, where Veronika is courting wealthy clients (her real business is using diamonds to launder dirty money), which means putting the Heart Diamond on display. Their plan for stealing it right out from under her involves everything from impersonating a Vanity Fair photographer to having Daniel crash the party with a big speech that’s a masterpiece of indirection.
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They escape in a rooftop helicopter that turns into a flat piece of cardboard, only to land in a French chateau that’s a booby-trapped museum of magic, from the metal puzzle door that Dave Franco’s Jack and Greenblatt’s June vie to crack open to the hall of mirrors to the upside-down rooms. There are times you may think, “Script by David Koepp and M.C. Escher.” The director, Ruben Fleischer (“Zombieland”), picking up where Louis Leterrier and Jon M. Chu left off, finds room for a Motocross race and Lady Gaga’s “Abracadabra.” And the action ranges from dueling card tricks to the kind of honest-to-God fights that merely serve to remind us that balletic action films really are magic tricks.
Morgan Freeman’s Thaddeus shows up, still twinkling with duplicity. Dominic Sessa, in his first major movie since “The Holdovers,” confirms his sloe-eyed appeal, which by the end made me think that he might be the second coming of Daniel Stern. The story finds room for both Isla Fisher (returning from the first film) and her sequel replacement, Lizzy Caplan, so that there are now Five Horseman. Harrelson brandishes that anything-goes leer that never gets old. Rosamund Pike, playing the spirit of loving filthy lucre over life itself, elevates a standard villain through the high timing of her theatrical hauteur. And the climax, picking up on the metaphysical sleight-of-hand that powered “Now You See Me 2,” lifts the veil of deception off reality itself. And does it all in good fun. Which is all this movie is or needs to be.
From Variety US