Now You See Me: Now You Don’t (Fleischer, 2025)

It has been a dozen years since Now You See Me, which I remember as being a poor man’s Mission: Impossible, relying on cameras to make illusions look more plausible than I think they would be in real life, and a poor man’s M. Night Shyamalan film with one twist too many. More importantly, it has been nine years since Now You See Me 2, which…I don’t remember at all.

The time in between franchise installments made Now You See Me: Now You Don’t feel a lot like a late issue Harry Potter movie. Was I supposed to know who that person was? Was the reason I didn’t because I don’t remember or because the actor looked different? Is there a reason Hagrid hasn’t show up yet? Is he off on some side quest or did he die in the last movie?

Eventually Rosamund Pike shows up with a South African accent delivering Bond-villain dialogue and the caper as a whole starts. None of it is unwatchable, but if you replaced Jesse Eisenberg with an animated wolf I am not sure I could distinguish any random fifteen seconds of the film from The Bad Guys 2.

This film has a Robin Hood theme that I don’t remember from the original. Pickpockets and thieves are annoying, so let’s have them steal cryptocurrency and blood diamonds from crooked oligarchs and give it to the poor and disenfranchised. Yet they are funded by some shadow group (The Eye) and live lives of celebrity and, seemingly, inexhaustible wealth themselves. Nearly all the illusions of the films entail elaborate set ups that, if you stop once to think about, would cost millions of dollars and weeks of preparation to set up.

Some of them, including one in this film, include things like car chases that are impossible to time and predict with the kind of precision necessary for high stakes sleight of hand. At one point, the plot depends upon throwing the world’s largest diamond across a crowded room and assuming nobody will see it. At another, it depends upon a villain noticing a gun and deciding to use it at precisely the right moment. One can always argue, I guess, that are schemers are just super-prepared, have contingencies upon contingencies for what they would have done. I am not buying it. Heists and schemes and schemes are hard to write, so why not just rely on stunts.

Since I have compared Now You See Me: Now You Don’t to everything else, I might as well drop an Adam West, Batman reference, since our heroes are trapped in a time-release, deathtrap that they manage to get out of by using their belt. The Batman allusion might also be on point for this reason — the film might actually work if it leaned into the camp fun. I hate to say it, because I believe that actors deserve paychecks wherever they can get them, but Eisenberg vacillates between looking bored and looking a little pissed that Ruffalo and Freeman manage to cash their checks with cameos while he has to babysit that Junior Avenge…er Horseman.