Now You See Me: Now You Don't Movie - Review

Sometimes, when a franchise returns to the screen after a long absence, you hope for a burst of new energy or at least a clever reinvention,...

Sometimes, when a franchise returns to the screen after a long absence, you hope for a burst of new energy or at least a clever reinvention, but with Now You See Me, Now You Don’t, what you actually get is a film that doubles down on its own absurdity, so depending on your appetite for cinematic cheese and your patience for being talked down to, this is either a delightfully preposterous return to the kind of glossy, logic-defying fun that’s been missing from cinemas, or a fresh test of just how far back your eyes can roll as the story lurches from one wild set piece to the next, all the while winking at you as if you’re in on the trick—even when the trick itself doesn’t make a lick of sense.

This sequel, which feels something like Avengers Endgame for fans of magic heists, is packed to the brim with the Rube Goldberg contraptions and slickly choreographed illusions you’ve come to expect, but it’s also unafraid to crank the illogic up to eleven, making the original’s infamous twist ending look almost restrained by comparison; under the direction of Ruben Fleischer (of Venom fame), the film seems to embrace a greater self-awareness, with Rosamund Pike’s billionaire villain Veronica Vanderberg even dropping a few pointed jabs at the corny aesthetic that defines the Horsemen’s brand of magic, and the whole thing feels more Adam West’s Batman than Christopher Nolan’s, stretching the limits of suspension of disbelief until it snaps, but doing so with a knowing grin that almost dares you to complain.

Ten years have passed since we last saw J. Daniel Atlas and his crew, and their sudden reunion show in Bushwick—where they steal a mountain of crypto from an audience member and redistribute it, or so it seems—quickly reveals itself to be another elaborate illusion, this time orchestrated by three Gen Z magicians-in-training (Charlie the brainiac, Bosow the shapeshifter, and June the locksmith), who are feeling pretty smug about their heist until the real Atlas crashes the party and recruits them for a bigger, more mysterious mission on behalf of The Eye, the secretive magic spy organization that’s always lurking in the wings.

Soon enough, the old gang is back together (with a few new faces), and the film gleefully adopts the Fast and Furious playbook, flipping former villains into allies and expanding the team until you lose track of just how many Horsemen there are; their goal this time is to expose Pike’s Vanderberg as a Nazi descendant, and while Pike shines as a villain who’s both luminous and fully aware of the film’s ridiculousness, Woody Harrelson is reliably entertaining, but much of the remaining cast seems to move through the film’s flashy, credit card commercial-inspired world as if weighed down by invisible sandbags.

Despite its blockbuster budget and all the resources of a major studio, the film can’t resist co-opting progressive language to sell tickets, with Vanderberg calling out the Horsemen as “entertainers masquerading as anti-capitalists”—a line that lands as both an indictment of her adversaries and the filmmakers themselves, as the movie peddles the fantasy that class warfare can be waged by a staff of gifted people loaded with clever tricks, all while inviting the audience to participate by patting themselves on the back for being in on the joke all throughout, even as they’re munching popcorn and watching the spectacle unfold.

The plot itself is wafer-thin, maybe thirty minutes of actual story stretched over nearly two hours, with the rest devoted to increasingly convoluted scenarios that pile illusion on top of illusion until you almost forget what the Horsemen are trying to accomplish in the first place, and while the film looks slick enough and Brian Tyler’s score does its best to make every moment feel momentous, the relentless optimism and reliance on making the audience feel like the butt of the joke leaves the whole thing feeling both stuck in the era it was made and oddly out of touch with its own premise—a movie about magic, but with no real magic to speak of.

By the time Atlas gets a call from The Eye on a phone line marked “20110”—which could be a sly nod to the past or just a clumsy misstep—the joke starts to feel like it’s on us, and if ever a movie begged for the clock to be turned back, it’s this one: a condescending sequel that assumes you’re willing to check your brain at the door, and maybe, just maybe, wishes it could do the same.