The idea of a crack team of stage magicians using their abilities to right wrongs and take down Bond-level bad guys is... look, you either buy in or you don't. This long-delayed third installment in the Now You See Me series does pretty much everything right, and the result is exactly what you'd expect: a very silly movie. You have been warned.
It's been ten years since global magic sensation - these movies take place in a parallel dimension where stage magic really is as cool as Chris Angel: Mindfreak thinks it is - The Four Horsemen performed on stage, so of course rumours of a hard-to-find comeback gig bring fans out of the wood work. As usual, the Horsemen do their standard trick of using magic to right wrongs (bad news for an embezzling finance bro), but there's a twist: these aren't the Horesemen you were expecting.
Charlie (Justice Smith), June (Ariana Greenblatt) and Bosco (Dominic Sessa) are young magicians who figured using the OG Horsemen's images was fair enough. Enter J Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), original leader of the Four Horsemen, who is less than impressed at these kids ripping off his act but a magic card told him he needs them to take down a bad guy so all good.
The bad guy is evil South African diamond miner Veronika Vanderberg (Rosalind Pike), who launders money for arms dealers and drug lords via selling overpriced diamonds and holding fancy events. The new teams' attempt to steal her family's Hope Diamond on a rare trip outside of its high security vault proves to be more difficult than they thought. Luckily the rest of the Horsemen - Merritt (Woody Harrelson), Jack (Dave Franco) and Henley (Isla Fisher) also received magic cards so they're on the scene as surprise backup.
From there the movie is pretty much just a bunch of illusions that mostly work and a couple of surprise reveals that again, mostly work. The best thing you can say about the story is that it does a great job of giving everyone enough screentime to make their characters feel essential, while jumping from set piece to set piece that, again, gives everyone enough to do to make them feel essential. Remember how The Fast & The Furious movies got a lot better once they started bringing all the old characters back? Same here.
The secret to this franchise's success - aside from finding a lot of actors who can come across as likeable, and also Jesse Eisenberg - is that it took a pair of genres that relied on outsmarting the audience (that'd be heist movies and movies about magic tricks) and made them as stupid as possible. Not always a bad thing! Much like magic itself, all the pleasures here are surface level: the second you start thinking about anything you're seeing, you've ruined it for yourself.
The result is a hangout movie best experienced as a chance to watch a group of good-looking airheads run around trading quips while everything around them is either glamourous, fake or a chance to make cops and security guards look silly. Not the best time you'll have in a cinema; not the worst time either.
- Anthony Morris
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