Now You See Me: Now You Don’t

We need a better term than “legacy sequel” to refer to Now You See Me: Now You Don’t. Nine years have passed since the second and previous movie, the unfathomably titled Now You See Me 2, arrived. That’s enough time for kids and teens who have enjoyed these diversions to grow up into full-on adulthood. But the gap is not on the order of Ghostbusters, Blade Runner, or Indiana Jones. And as fun as the first two movies have been, it’s a stretch to claim there is a Now You See Me legacy. The movies made money for Lionsgate, each grossing around $350 million worldwide. But the reviews were tepid from the start and even most fans of them, a class I’d put myself in, would not describe them as landmark cinema.

Still, a lucrative lapsed franchise is revived with many returning cast members and a few new additions. Filling the director’s chair previously occupied by The Transporter‘s Louis Leterrier and Wicked‘s Jon M. Chu is Ruben Fleischer, a man who’s been at the helm of three prior mainstream Jesse Eisenberg movies, two of them good to great (the Zombieland movies) and one not so much (30 Minutes or Less). Screenplay duties in this franchise’s revolving door have passed to four new voices: Zombieland scribes Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes‘ Michael Lesslie, and genre veteran Seth Grahame-Smith (Dark Shadows, The Lego Batman Movie, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice), with American Hustle‘s Eric Warren Singer taking a story credit.

The third time proves not to be the charm here, as Now You Don’t provides a slight but definite drop in quality from its two predecessors. Those predecessors were the closest thing the 2010s got to National Treasure movies: fun, exciting, inoffensive adventures requiring suspension of disbelief in spades. This new installment aims to provide more of the same. Maybe the franchise has kind of run its course, having refreshingly never been conceived as anything but a stand-alone entertainment in the first place. Perhaps we as a society have grown older and more jaded, thanks to the pandemic and widening political divides. Or it could just be that Fleischer and the new writers fall short of the fresh cleverness of the two prior movies.

The Four Horsemen, the team of popular Robin Hood-esque stage magicians, come out of retirement after a trio of young friends (Justice Smith, The Holdovers‘ Dominic Sessa, and Barbie‘s Ariana Greenblatt) use their likenesses and bag of tricks to put on a crowd-pleasing show of their own. In case you need a refresher, the Horsemen are de facto leader J. Daniel Atlas (Eisenberg), card-flinging Jack Wilder (Dave Franco), wisecracking Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson), and escape artist Henley Reeves (Isla Fisher), who is back with the gang after sitting out the second movie.

Initially, Atlas tracks down the Gen Z-ers to object to their copyright infringement, but soon the classic Horsemen are reassembled and working together with the up-and-comers to try to outwit a horrible South African CEO/socialite (Rosamund Pike) and steal the world’s largest queen diamond.

Plot specifics do not seem to matter a great deal to this franchise. It’s all about set pieces, twists, misdirections, and the thrill of all the aforementioned. There’s not much to categorize as new tricks here, but the writers do capture the voice of the series and the characters you’ll remember if you’ve revisited the movies anytime recently. They seem to be a perennial draw on Netflix.

The only new heights reached in this installment are in corniness, but you could certainly point to moments from the two previous ones that compare, like 2 featuring Harrelson as Merritt’s identical twin brother. You can’t point out the corniness without recognizing the wholesome escapism of it all. Other big budget movies today involve dinosaurs, espionage, and superheroes. Now You See Me stands out by focusing on magic tricks, with a genuine belief in illusions and showmanship but a slick enough presentation not to be dismissed as niche geek fodder.

While Michael Caine does not come out of retirement to play the role of Arthur Tressler a third time, we do get a last-minute Mark Ruffalo cameo in hologram form. We also get Morgan Freeman in the flesh, as former magic debunker and grandmaster of secret magician society The Eye, Thaddeus Bradley, although his return is downright disrespectful. And there is another surprising return, which the production seems to have done a good job obscuring in online information. I won’t spoil it so blatantly, although the movie’s early multiple mentions of the character kind of telegraph an appearance that is meant to shock and disarm.

There is not much to celebrate here on a creative or cinematic level. Everyone knows this is a commercial assignment and that the goal is just to make this as broadly appealing and watchable as possible. And while there’s not much to sink your teeth into or passionately debate online, it still manages to be big, dumb, implausible fun. Which is scarce enough in 2025 cinema to give this some intrigue.