Ruben Fleischer’s third Horsemen film is quick, glossy and busy, and Rosamund Pike is having a wonderful time as the villain. But it explains every illusion the moment it is over, and a trick you are told about afterwards has not fooled anyone.
Twelve years after Now You See Me (2013) turned four stage magicians into bank robbers, Ruben Fleischer gets the Horsemen back together and hands them three apprentices. The prize is a diamond. The mark is Veronika Vanderberg (Rosamund Pike), a woman with a great deal of money and no interest in explaining where it came from. That is plenty for a heist film, and for half an hour Now You See Me: Now You Don’t moves like a franchise that knows exactly what its audience has come for. The difficulty is that they have come for magic, and the film keeps almost none in stock.
The recruits are Bosco (Dominic Sessa), June (Ariana Greenblatt) and Charlie (Justice Smith), young magicians who grew up watching the Horsemen’s old shows. Sessa plays Bosco as a boy who has never been told no and is curious to find out how it feels. Greenblatt is quick and unimpressed, and wins nearly every exchange with the elders. Smith gives Charlie the nerves of the one person in the group who has thought about consequences. The three of them have an easy rhythm, and when the film lets them work a room on their own it is at its lightest.
The old guard arrive to be teased about their age and to tease back. Jesse Eisenberg’s J. Daniel Atlas still talks faster than anyone else in the scene and still expects to be listened to; Eisenberg has grown into the part, and the arrogance is now funny rather than grating. Woody Harrelson, Dave Franco and Isla Fisher slide back in as if they had never left, and Lizzy Caplan’s Lula turns up too. That makes eight magicians on one team, and the script cannot find work for all of them, so several stand at the back and react.
Pike is the reason to stay. She plays Vanderberg with an accent she is plainly enjoying, smiles through her most menacing lines, holds every pause a beat longer than anyone else on screen, and treats the Horsemen as a mild inconvenience. We laughed out loud twice, both times at Pike, and both times at a line that on the page cannot have been more than a threat. It is a big performance in a film that otherwise plays small, and it shows up how little the rest of the cast has been given to do.
George Richmond shoots it bright and glossy, every surface polished, every city at golden hour, which suits a story about people who want to be looked at. David Scheunemann’s best work is a mansion built for deception, with rooms that are not the size they appear and doors that open onto the wrong places; the set piece staged there is the one stretch where the film feels like a magic show rather than a chase. Sophie Canale puts Pike in sharp tailoring and the young trio in clothes they can run in. Brian Tyler’s score is brass and drums pushed forward, and it announces a trick slightly before the trick arrives.
Stacey Schroeder cuts fast, and she cuts in a particular way that is the film’s real problem. Every illusion is followed by a flashback explaining how it was done, usually with a wire, a double or a piece of technology nobody had mentioned. Around the hour mark we noticed we had stopped trying to work anything out, because the film would shortly tell us, and we felt, plainly, cheated. A magic trick you are told about afterwards is not a trick; it is an alibi.
Four names share the screenplay credit, Michael Lesslie, Paul Wernick, Seth Grahame-Smith and Rhett Reese, with Lesslie and Eric Warren Singer on story, and it reads that way: every scene has a quip, a piece of exposition and a callback, and few have anything else. Reese and Wernick wrote Zombieland (2009) for Fleischer, and the same reflex is here, the joke arriving before the moment has landed. Ocean’s Eleven (2001) got away with explaining its heist because Soderbergh let us watch the mechanism work in real time. This film hides the mechanism, then shows us a diagram.
It runs 112 minutes and carries a 12A, and it will pass a wet evening with teenagers who liked the first two, who will be glad of the old faces and quick to like the new ones. Watch it for Pike, for the mansion and for the trio. Do not try to guess how anything is done; the film would rather you did not, and it will tell you anyway.
