Can We Go Back to Not Seeing Them?

There was an almost nine year gap between the releases of Now You See Me 2Now You See Me 2 (2016) and Now You See Me: Now You Don’t (2025), and you have to think that was because no one was asking for further adventures from this band of misfit magicians. As I’ve noted before, I have nothing against the concept of stage magicians using their skills in illusion and misdirection to act as thieves to pull off heists. There’s material to be mined there, and I think if a script were written well and put into the right hands we could actually get a good movie out of that concept. So far, though, we’re three-for-three with these films squandering any potential the concept could have.

Now You See Me: Now You Don’t sets itself up as a kind of soft reboot for the franchise, introducing a trio of new characters for us to follow before slowly, over time, bringing back the various other magicians to reunite the whole crew of “Horsemen”. All of this is done so that the magicians can chase off after a new villain, freed from much of the past continuity (we think) to let us have a new, focused, story. Or that’s how it should work, if only this film, like the previous two, could ever figure out how to get out of its own way.

You see, like the previous two, Now You See Me: Now You Don’t simply can’t tell a heist story. It can’t be about finding an evil corporate person and stealing their fortune out from under them (a plotline I could get behind if the films could ever actually give that to us). No, the film has to layer on twist after twist until the whole story creaks, groans, and eventually falls apart under the sheer weight of it all. Now You See Me: Now You Don’t becomes so insufferably stupid that you start to wonder how anyone thought this film would ever be good. But then you’re reminded that this is a Now You See Me movie, and these have never been good.

We open at a magic show where, supposedly, the original Four Horsemen – J. Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson), Jack Wilder (Dave Franco), and Henley Reeves (Isla Fisher) – are performing a special, secret, popup show. The act, though, is in reality a lure for a billionaire who raided the city’s employee pension fund before wandering away with his fortune. Naturally the magicians, via proxy Bosco LeRoy (Dominic Sessa), steal the billionaire’s fortune before vanishing, leaving him with nothing.

But, as it turns out, the four magicians weren’t actually there. It was all an elaborate set of deepfakes and holograms set up by tech wizard Charlie (Justice Smith) who, along with Bosco and skilled pickpocket June Rouclere (Ariana Greenblatt), have been pretending to be the Four Horsemen to continue the legacy of Robin Hood-like antics. This, however, gets the attention of Atlas, shoes shows up at their door and enlists them in a new, secret mission: to rob Veronika Vanderberg (Rosamund Pike), the head of the largest diamond conglomerate (read: blood diamonds), specifically so they can steal the world’s largest diamond, the Heart Diamond, that is the Vanderberg family’s prized possession. And, of course, magical antics will ensue.

I won’t sugar coat this: I think Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, despite trying very hard to act as a kind of course correction for the franchise, is probably the worst film in this series yet. It’s overstuffed, overly elaborate, and incredibly stupid, all without actually amounting to much of anything once every twist and turn is finally revealed. It’s the definition of “all flash, no substance”, giving us a very active movie where the magicians run around a lot, but very little of consequence is really done. And all of this to tackle a story about blood diamonds. Don’t get me wrong, blood diamonds aren’t a good thing, by any stretch. But in a current economic climate where tech billionaires are raiding the middle class of all their money, was this storylike really at all prescient?

Let’s start with what the film gets right: the new characters. Unlike the original Four Horsemen, the new crew of Charlie, Bosco, and June are more interesting, developed characters. We’re introduced to them already working together, acting as a kind of found-family, which helps us to bond with them. While, sure, they’re each defined by a single trait – Charlie is the tech guy, Bosco does impersonations, and June is the physical performer – there’s enough chemistry and banter between the characters that they feel like real people. Far more than the original Horsemen ever did.

Unfortunately the film doesn’t actually keep the focus on these three new “horse kids” for very long. Once they pull off their first heist, stealing the Heart Diamond within the first act of the film (so I don’t feel bad spoiling this twist), things quickly go off the rails. That heist ends with each of the other original Horsemen showing up to aid in the escape, and we go from having four main characters to pay attention to (which was already bad enough) up to seven, and the returning characters get absolutely no character development at all.

It’s surprising how little has been done with these characters. While they weren’t exactly trapped in amber, as Jack has broken up with Lulu and Henley went off to have kids, these are all airless facts that don’t actually matter to the plot. We’re told these things happen, but never shown how it really matters to the characters. If we’d been told, “and nothing happened in the last ten years, so don’t worry about it,” that would have been as consequential to the plot as what little character development we do get for these characters.

And the film can’t help but continue to trot out more and more people from the past. Along with a cameo appearance from Mark Ruffalo (which comes near the end of the film and makes no sense), we also have the return of Morgan Freeman's Thaddeus Bradley, who was an antagonist in the first film before eventually being revealed as an ally in the second film. Don’t expect this third movie to remember that continuity, though, as Henley (who wasn’t even around for the second film, having left the group) treats Thaddeus as an old friend even though last she knew he was rotting in prison for being anti-magic.

The only returning character I did like was Lulu May, once again played by Lizzie Caplan, but that’s only because Caplan does all she can to elevate the role. While it feels like the others are simply going through the motions, collecting a paycheck while they wander through this nonsensical movie, Caplan puts her all into playing her manic, zany, madcap character. She was the best part of the second film and, once again, she makes her scenes in this third film equally watchable. If they ever do spin-offs for these films, I would willingly watch a Lulu May solo magician movie. I think she’d make it good.

What really ruins the film for me, though, is its incessant need to layer twist after twist on top of twist just to try and keep the audience guessing. By the end of the film (and I won’t spoil anything in detail) we have a reveal that puts everything we just watched into a new context, not unlike the big twists that came at the end of the first film, but these twists here contradict everything we knew before and make certain characters seem like sociopaths risking lives for big heist. The ending of the movie is so nonsensical, so idiotic, and so out of whack with the film we just watched that I felt my brain shut down entirely. I couldn’t take it anymore. I was out.

Now You See Me: Now You Don’t is a ludicrous, insipid movie that is actively hostile to its own audience. It dresses up like a light and breezy magic film but very quickly gets mired in its own bullshit to the point that it’s simply no fun to watch. I hate being negative about movies as I love being able to sit down and enjoy a story on its own merits. Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, though, sucks all the fun out of the experience. This movie is bad, on every level. If I never have to watch another one of these films it will be too soon.