Watch Your back, F&F
The magic trick here is how these movies keep getting made and keep making cash.
Now You See Me: Now you Don’t
Director: Ruben Fleischer • Writers: Michael Lesslie, Paul Wernick, Rhett Reese, Seth Grahame-Smith
Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Dave Franco, Isla Fisher, Justice Smith, Ariana Greenblatt, Rosamund Pike
USA • 1hr 52mins
Opens Hong Kong November 13 • IIA
Grade: B
Pop quiz: What happened in either Now You See Me (2013) or its 2016 sequel Now You See Me 2 (holy shit, forgot that was directed by Wicked’s John M Chu)? I’ll wait.
If you could name any of the major plot points or moments in either film, well, congratulations. You’re a better person than me and probably a member of the surprise fan club of the four Robin Hood-y magicians who steal from the rich and corrupt – insurance execs (well before that guy in Manhattan got shot by the supermodel), shady tech overlords – via the art of illusion and sleight of hand. They go by The Four Horsemen and their dazzling, high tech, packed house live shows have made them massive celebs in their own right. This time they’re signalling the apocalypse because these movies just won’t die. They’re a plague upon the cinema.
Okay, that’s an exaggeration, because as franchises go, the Now You See Me series is relatively harmless, mostly low-effort entertaining with a cast that genuinely looks like it’s at least having a good time. The kind of genuine affection that doesn’t hold its audience in contempt is rare and wonderful, so despite the films’ insistence on constantly retconning their own lore, it’s easy to see their appeal, including the new one, Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, which is oddly heading down a Fast & Furious road. A bunch of barely legal do-gooders who are making their own family and adapt their unique skills to help the average Joe get payback for some kind of injustice? Sounds like minor key Torettos V2.0 to me.
These people like their job
Now You See Me: Now You Don’t – and why isn’t this called Now You 3 Me? – makes sense from a ledger perspective too, so a franchise is the logic step (yes a fourth is in development). The first two made a flabbergasting and unfathomable US$700 million worldwide and, middling star salaries (middling as in not $20 million plus gross points) aside, are relatively inexpensive to produce. The cost of judicious CGI and five-star hotels for limited location shooting is offset by the locations ponying up for exposure (New Orleans, Las Vegas, Macau) tourism boards can’t always buy, this time from Abu Dhabi and Antwerp.
Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland, Venom, the gawdawful Uncharted) steps into Chu and Louis Leterrier’s shoes and pretty much picks up where those two left off. Things start in Brooklyn when a trio of young magicians, Charlie (Justice Smith, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves), Bosco (Dominic Sessa, The Holdovers) and June (Ariana Greenblatt, Borderlands), follow in the Four Horsemen’s footsteps and imitate them with some modern tech and empty a douchey cryptobro’s wallet and redistribute his fraudulent wealth. They think they’ve gotten away clean but uh-oh. They find Horsemen leader J Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg, oddly not at all grating) waiting for them in their lair. After he chews them out for copyright violation, he tells them The Eye – the super-secret society of magicians (da fuq?) – has tapped them to help Atlas with his next mission: taking down Veronika Vanderberg (Rosamund Pike, with the jankiest South African accent you ever did hear), the De Beers-type diamond mining heiress with a super-dark past. They agree, and off they go to swipe Vanderberg’s most “prishuss daaaamond” at auction, and reunite with the other Horsemen: mentalist Merritt (Woody Harrelson, stoned), card master Jack (Dave Franco) and returning escape artist Henley (Isla Fisher). Clever and elaborate heist via chicanery ensues.
Now You 3 Me (I don’t care, that’s my title) is all very ridiculous. No one cares about the physics of time and space; evidently you can walk across Abu Dhabi in a few minutes. A billion-dollar “daaaamond” has one dude keeping an eye on it. Somehow, someway, these nerdy magicians have become masters of hand-to-hand combat. Somehow, someway, these nerdy magicians have become the arbiters of right and wrong. The plot holes are legion. But there’s a wish fulfilment vibe here that’s legit hard to resist. Jack says it near the beginning, we’ve been hit with wars, pandemics, gutted economies and AI, and we could all use a little magic. I can live without the magic but no shit, Sherlock, some un-nuanced wins for demo-spanning good guys without a gritty, overly-psychologised backstory (mostly) is a welcome breath of fresh air; we don’t need The Prestige. And credit to writers Michael Lesslie, Paul Wernick, Rhett Reese and Seth Grahame-Smith (did this movie really need four, or is it a Horsemen riff?) for not pitting the women against each other – Henley’s replacement Lula (Lizzie Caplan) turns up for a bit – for resisting the temptation to beat the Olds vs Gen Y/Z tension to death, and for finding a way to roll mentor Thaddeus Bradley (Morgan Freeman) and FBI agent/not FBI agent/The Eye mastermind Dylan Rhodes (Mark Ruffalo) into the action and set up the next sequel. This movie knows what it is, delivers, and won’t apologise for its goofy hokiness. And it doesn’t really have to. That’s magic.