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Now You See Me: Now You Don't, starring Jesse Eisenberg and Rosamund Pike, directed by Ruben Fleischer
Trailer: Lionsgate

Now You See Me: Now You Don't
Directed by Ruben Fleischer
Rated PG-13
Tricked 14 November 2025
#NowYouSeeMe

The third Now You See Me movie has some nifty new tricks up its sleeve.

The Eyes Have It

Now You See Me Now You Don't movie poster

It’s not like the world was clamoring for another round of magic from the Four Horsemen, but as Now You See Me: Now You Don’t opens, there is a whisp of anticipation as those lead magicians – who last made a big screen "appearing act" in 2016 – drum up audience excitement at an underground show ostensibly promoted through clues in social media channels.

Their target is in the audience: a group of guys who reaped millions in a failed crypto project.

It’s kind of strange, though. As each of the Horsemen is introduced, they magically appear. Okay, magic is their game, but this is next-level out-of-nowhere stuff. An audience member is pulled onto the stage to make it all seem "real." Each of the Horsemen jumps into this supposedly innocent stranger, providing him with multiple personalities. Again, their leaping into another person and disappearing is inexplicable.

Until it’s explained.

That’s part of the beauty of the Now You See Me movies. Extravagant tricks are executed, but the backtracking and reveal of how the tricks were done unveil the rather mundane aspects of magic.

It’s all about making people believe a lie, essentially.

Diamonds Are Forever

As the stage is set, narration brings things current. It’s been 10 years since the Horsemen broke up. Since then, the world’s been ravaged by pandemics, climate change and AI.

It’s also timely with the movie’s falling in the shadow of the recent Louvre heist of the nation’s crown jewels. An embarrassing episode of sabotage – perhaps an inside job – as the jewels were swiped in broad daylight by a gang of thieves disguised as construction workers and whose escape is not in something exciting like a classic Alpine sports car, but instead by way of a slow-moving crane carriage and then motorcycles.

That’s all great for a setup and context, but once the action begins, none of those global phenomena play a role, leaving the feeling of a missed opportunity as the magicians return to business as usual.

Mostly.

What’s left is the notion the Four Horsemen – now augmented by a threesome of young magician hooligans – are anti-capitalists righting wrongs. That’s dangerous territory. While it’s not explicit here, any notion capitalism is corrupt and socialism is bliss is pure insanity. Where there are people, there is corruption.

It's a matter of how the corruption is addressed.

In this case, the corrupted is a sexy billionaire named Veronika Vanderberg, who’s gamely played by Rosamund Pike. Back in 2002, Pike was a Bond girl, Miranda Frost, in Die Another Day. Here, Pike makes a strong case for becoming a Bond villain. Oh, all the juicy headlines Amazon could enjoy with that bit of casting. As Veronika, Pike takes on an effective Afrik Sud accent and she bares her teeth on occasion. But it’d be great to see her get more opportunities to sink those teeth into more meaty menacing.

As it stands, Veronika leads the Vanderberg empire, which features an F1 racing team in an otherwise nebulous business operation that is also home to the Heart Diamond, a huge jewel worth quite a bit of coal. At least Veronika gets a great Bond-villain moment when she has a CEO suck on a prickly diamond which, if swallowed, would shred his throat and internals while going down. It’s a surprisingly effective seen of dastardly conduct as the CEO is forced to suck on the diamond during a very stereotypical Hollywood-style meeting of wealthy, conspiratorial CEOs sitting at a long table discussing world domination.

Naturally, the Horsemen see her as a global threat. They want to steal the diamond from her and give it back to the citizens to whom it rightfully belongs. It’s a Robin Hood story that involves a dirty Vanderberg back story involving Veronika’s unfaithful father and a housemaid, with whom he has a child which leads to a dark, murky chain of events that includes the death of Veronika’s mother.

Zip It, Sparkles!

Now You See Me: Now You Don’t certainly has its entertainment value. The cast, for one thing, is largely likable. Even Jesse Eisenberg as the group’s front man, J. Daniel Atlas, seems to be aging well and becoming less grating as he goes along. Of course, he’s backed up by the returning Horsemen: Woody Harrelson (Merritt), Isla Fisher (Henley) and Dave Franco (Jack), along with the extended team of Lizzy Caplan (Lula) and Morgan Freeman (now 88 and sounding a little less commanding as Thaddeus; where has the time gone?).

The newbies are agreeable enough. A fair effort is given to imbuing a guy named Charlie (Justice Smith) with some depth, as well as a Springsteen-ish lookalike, Bosco (Dominic Sessa). But a young woman named June (Ariana Greenblatt), who can move up the side of a building like a parkour master (or Mario, as her friends note), isn’t particularly well defined. That’s a bummer because in many respects she still comes across as the most interesting of the three.

These new kids merge with the Horsemen through the manipulations of the Eye (more or less; there’s no need to spoil anything).

While that gives the movie some fresh energy and the usual array of ageist contrasts, it’s also problematic.

Home of the Eye

Having a large ensemble cast that forms a cohesive team can be challenging to manage narratively, particularly in terms of character development and interactions. Think of the red shirts in Star Trek, or even the supporting cast members like Sulu and Uhura who serve a purpose while typically adding little to the drama. Equally, The Rise of Skywalker devolved into a stew of cringe dialogue, hollow emotions and missed character opportunities, although that was thanks in large part to absolutely no narrative plan from the beginning of the trilogy.

The Horsemen ratchet up to nine members when tallying Lula and Thaddeus, the new three and the original four. That generates a lot of interactions to manage and it’s not done all that well here. The dialogue is one of the first things to suffer. No emotions ring genuine. These people are friends until they’re not and that only lasts until they say they’re friends again.

Drama? Only superficially. Give it a minute and it’ll go away, like a magic trick.

It also means when one of these Horsemen dies, the emotion is muted. Sad? Yes. Impactful? No. Not at all, unfortunately.

But, of course, they love each other. After all, where would they be without their fellow Horsemen? That is, ignoring the past 10 years during which their lives went along absolutely fine without each other.

This also means there’s no real need to see the first two installments in this series. Doing so wouldn’t hurt to get a little more out of the back story and character references, but a necessity it is not.

I Am An Twerp

The first half of the movie works well, but something’s missing and it’s something that makes the second half a little clunky. It’s a missing card in the trick deck.

Even as the story plays off a nifty chapter of World War II history in which Jasper Maskelyne – a British magician – helped defeat the Nazis with the illusions of inflatable towns and tanks, the Horsemen’s trickery relies on people making basic assumptions about the stability of the environment they see.

But there’s something in the chemistry – across the ensemble and drilling into the action – that makes the movie come up short of greatness. This is puzzling in its own right, given the director, Ruben Fleischer, one of the co-writers, Rhett Reese (a writer on all three Deadpool movies) and co-star Woody Harrelson all worked together before – on the Zombieland movies. Reese is accompanied on the screenplay by Seth Grahame-Smith (Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, The Lego Batman Movie) and Michael Lesslie (adaptations of Hamlet and Macbeth as well as The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes).

There should be a greater level of creativity that builds to a more timely and impactful conclusion.

Instead, there’s a big escape from a glass cell being filled with sand – a scenario that seems fit for a Vegas show – that runs a bit sloppy. Too easily, a waterpipe is forced to burst. Then Henley uses her diamond-studded engagement ring to scratch and crack the cell. That’s a nice callback to the diamond at the heart of the story, but it’s supposed to be some sort of payoff in reference to her getting married and raising a family.

As for poor Veronika (yes, there is some sympathy for this devil), she’s relegated to darting around the stage of the final reveal like with eyes wide open, like a deer in headlights.

Between the glass cell and the trapped Veronika, the action devolves into the feel of a shoddy Scooby-Doo episode. Surely Veronika’s thinking infernal, meddlesome kids ruined everything!

Even so, this chapter tees up a reboot of the series with the promise we’ll see them now and again.

• Originally published at MovieHabit.com.