R | 1h 52m | Comedy, Caper, Crime | 2025
The third entry in the magician-movie franchise, “Now You See Me: Now You Don’t,” reintroduces the Four Horsemen. They’re a quartet of world-class magicians, who, like the Justice League—but with magic tricks as their superpowers—combat villains, foil plots, and provide humanitarian aid, but on a smaller scale. But not that much smaller. The latest installment has them join forces with a new, younger, conjuror-crew to appeal to the younger generations.
Then, they try to steal the world’s biggest diamond with intent to sell it and give away the proceeds. Which is a Robin Hood move, of course. Many of us currently residing in Manhattan have troubling thoughts of socialism on our minds, and so the thought hit me—was Robin Hood a socialist? He stole from the rich and gave to the poor. More on this later.
Magic
A magician needs a live audience to make magic. It happens right under your nose, you can’t figure out for the life of you how they did it, and you’re delightfully mystified by it all. Therefore, filmed stage magic doesn’t really have much of an impact—we’re all aware that editing and CGI can create any illusion imaginable. This means that the only real trick a movie about magic needs to pull off is to stay a step ahead of the audience’s plot-guessers.
Leader of the Band
J. Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg) is the erstwhile leader of the disbanded group. Eisenberg’s stock-in-trade has always been snarky, dryly sarcastic wunderkind arrogance (such as his portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg in “The Social Network”). As in the other magic movies, much of the fun here comes from watching all the members of his equally egotistical team test his authority, bicker, and insult each other.Joining Eisenberg’s Atlas are porkpie-hatted mentalist Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson), escapologist Henley Reeves (Isla Fisher) as the group’s sole female member, and card-shark Dave Wilder (Dave Franco).
Young Turks and Playing Robin Hood
The magic show’s opening sequence at first appears to be an anniversary celebration of the Horsemen’s founding, but it’s a smoke-screen that morphs into a debut for a young trio of upstarts whose illusions are charity and social activist-driven: Charlie (Justice Smith), June (Ariana Greenblatt, and Bosco Leroy (Dominic Sessa).These three successfully part an arrogant crypto-bro in the audience from his currency, while simultaneously blowing the whistle on his scams, alerting law enforcement, and redistributing his wealth to the audience in the blink of an eye.
Danny, having seen their fliers around town, where they pass themselves off as his former crew—is quite impressed. He invites them to join forces with the Horsemen. After some fun and competitive tit-for-tat about who’s got the superior trickery—old fogey’s versus young bucks—they all jet to Antwerp, to trick one Veronika Vanderberg (Rosamund Pike).
Vanderberg’s a glamorous South African international crime syndicate-boss, with a network of diamond aficionados who front her real business, which is money laundering. She’s the owner of a massive, heart-shaped diamond. Take a wild guess what’s going to get conjured out of her clutches.
The movie tries to give its fans something old and something new, while shamelessly laying track for a fourth installment. Soon, “Now You See Me: Now You Don’t” becomes a kitchen-sink comic thriller, pin-balling around, and therefore more like the “Pink Panther” films than a standard caper.
Robin Hood Parallels
After giving it a bit of thought (and some googling) I learned that Robin Hood and his band of merry men were not socialists. Like the Horsemen, they primarily targeted corrupt officials, such as the Sheriff of Nottingham, and greedy churchmen, who were unlawfully overtaxing the locals. Robin Hood returned money and goods that had been unjustly taken, instead of redistributing the legitimate wealth of rich people. So more of a rebel and an outlaw fighting against localized tyranny (Prince John’s abuses of power and feudal oppression).
