One Thing I Like About Now You See Me: Now You Don’t

At the start of Act 3 of Now You See Me: Now You Don’t — the third in a series of movies about super-hero stage magicians who use their skills to pull off social justice heists — we get establishing shots of a flashy event in Abu Dhabi that our villain is holding in honor of her F1 car. It’s all set to “Abracadabra” by Lady Gaga, and you know the person in charge of music must’ve been practically peeing themselves the whole movie, desperate to finally be able to let loose and let the needle drop. We see our heroes happily walking together towards the event, and one of them wise-cracks: “Yas Island: the Orlando of the Middle East!” End scene.

I couldn’t help but laugh out loud. It’s not even the most ridiculous thing in the movie, by far. But it felt like the past hour and a half of raw, unfiltered absurdity had finally overwhelmed me. I’d come out the other side a changed person, my last impulse to fight back defeated, leaving me with nothing to do but laugh as it all washed o’er me.

The movie is shamelessly corny, even more than the acts of the magicians it claims to idolize (at one point, a guy driving the aforementioned race car says to himself, “Help me, Ricky Jay!”). I haven’t seen either of the first two, so I did briefly wonder if I’d be at a disadvantage, having missed out on all the lore-building. But it opens with an “underground” magic show serving as a reunion performance for the returning cast, where each one of them introduces themselves by essentially reading out a description of their characters from a synopsis of the first two movies.

Then they perform an illusion designed to rob a cartoonishly gross crypto-bro and give his ill-gained money back to the audience, and it was so blatantly a parade of visual effects that would never work outside of a movie, that I was wondering what was the baseline for this movie’s version of reality. Fortunately, I didn’t have to wonder for too long, because they quickly pull back the curtain and reveal that it was all holograms, projected onto clear sheets of acrylic.

In other words, it had all the realistic rigor of a Scooby-Doo episode, where we see a full-on glowing skeleton astronaut chasing teenagers around an abandoned air field, and then we discover it was all pulled off by one guy with a closed-circuit television and some glow-in-the-dark paint.

Actually, more than Scooby-Doo, it feels about as subtle and realistic as an episode of Captain Planet, given the villain. Rosamund Pike plays a ruthless diamond heiress who murdered her housekeeper, and having gotten a taste for blood, continues to brutally murder a German (?) accent. It’s the kind of performance that usually makes you say, “Well at least she was having fun!” But I’m not convinced any of the actors were genuinely having fun. There’s a sense that the light has gone out behind all of their eyes, not just Jesse Eisenberg’s as you’d expect. There’s nothing outright wrong with any of it, just the sense that you can see them all hitting their marks and exchanging their quips while their thoughts are preoccupied by how they’re going to spend the paycheck.

And yet, in its most amazing feat, it actually ends up being kind of fun? None of the cast feels legit, or even a tiny bit sincere, but the movie’s assembled a bunch of inherently charismatic people who could easily do all of this with their eyes closed. When Lizzy Caplan — who I think is physically incapable of not being appealing and magnetic — shows up, it gives a jolt of energy to the thing that makes it seem like things are getting good… and then it kind of peters out. But even when she’s having to deliver blandly corny quips about Yas Island, she can’t help but give off a passive aura of likeability that extends to the whole movie.

And a heist movie, even one that’s both implausible and predictable, can’t help but be at least a little bit engaging.

There’s one scene in particular, shot as if it were one extended, continuous take, in which each of our seven (!) lead characters swirls around each other, taking turns trying to one-up each other with illusions. It escalates from card tricks that undeniably feel like VFX, to more and more elaborate gags that eventually turn into one character transforming a torn-up playing card into a blizzard of confetti, which another character walks through and effortlessly does a complete costume change. It’s so brazenly unconcerned with being plausible that it feels like the scene itself is an attempt at misdirection. To hypnotize us into not trying to process what we’re seeing as if it were an actual movie, and instead just appreciate the spectacle.

Again, I haven’t seen the first two movies. But the premise of Now You See Me: Now You Don’t implies an unrealistic but still reverent celebration of stage magic and its pioneers. This is most obvious in a scene where Justice Smith’s character, who the movie takes care to relentlessly stress is a “magic nerd,” goes wide-eyed through a museum of rare artifacts from well-known magicians. Part of that is to introduce a historic trick in a shot that might as well have THIS IS FORESHADOWING super-imposed on it, but the rest is to establish that this universe is one where stage magicians are super-heroes.

You might think that this is to give audiences a peek behind the scenes of what real stage magic is like, but it’s not at all. I’m not even well-versed in the history of magic, but I feel like I could’ve hammered out this script based solely on what I already know and a web browser opened to the “history of magic” page of Wikipedia. The movie’s actually a celebration of the showmanship of a big, Vegas-ready, magic act. Unabashedly corny and all driven by spectacle. And most of what you get out of it is how willing you are to just take in the spectacle.

And again, the ridiculousness of the movie ends up being part of its charm. It’s hard to be offended or insulted by it. Even when it tries to be relevant to our earth, it comes across more as dated and tone-deaf than offensive. In the spectacular finale, in a shocking twist that everyone saw coming at least an hour ago, the diamond heiress is served Justice1 on stage in front of a crowd of affluent F1 fans on Yas Island in Abu Dhabi. Our heroes announce that the diamond will be returned to its rightful place of origin in South Africa, and exposing her will also take down all of the greedy billionaires who were complicit in the trade of blood diamonds. And even better, they’ll give back some of that money to the crowd. Of affluent F1 fans on Yas Island in Abu Dhabi.

At the start of Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, there’s a black screen with text warning that the film contains flashing lights. I’d initially thought that it was a warning for photosensitive people who are prone to seizures, and I kept waiting for a set piece based entirely around strobe lights or something. But I never noticed anything particularly egregious. Based on everything else in the movie, though — including a tense scene in which a professional escape artist performing a heist to steal a diamond from a diamond heiress needs a group brainstorm and 15 minutes to realize that diamonds cut glass — I’m wondering if it was a more general-purpose warning for the target audience who’d be surprised and delighted by this movie. They might not grasp the entire concept of cinema, and be startled to suddenly find themselves in a dark room where disorienting lights are flashing onto a screen and seeming to make moving images.

1
No pun intended, although considering that that’s exactly the kind of corny joke this movie would love, maybe it was intended

1 No pun intended, although considering that that’s exactly the kind of corny joke this movie would love, maybe it was intended