Movies & TV movie reviews Now You See Me: Now You Don’t Is All Flash and Little Substance The Four Horsemen franchise’s third installment dresses up old tricks as something newish and mostly entertaining By Natalie Zutter | Published on November 17, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share Nine years ago, I quoted Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige in my review of Now You See Me 2, as the magic heists franchise was solidly acting out the first two steps as described by Michael Caine: First they established The Pledge, or introducing something seemingly ordinary—a fun adventure starring Robin Hood-esque magicians. Then they executed The Turn, making the ordinary extraordinary—more elaborate tricks and raising the question of whether they’re actually wizards. After disappearing for the better part of a decade, the Four Horsemen finally get to act out the third part, The Prestige, by reappearing in Now You See Me: Now You Don’t… but it’s unclear what exactly they’re proving by coming back. In 2013, the Four Horsemen were a fledgling team of illusionists empowered by the secret magicians cabal Eye to steal banker and benefactor Arthur Tressler’s (Caine again) fortune. Among their motives was to rectify how his insurance company mistreated victims of Hurricane Katrina; for that and other twist reasons, the heist was personal. In 2025, the baddies are crypto bros and a blood diamond Nazi heiress—timely, yes, but also wincingly on-the-nose. (One wonders why the writers reached back to World War II for their villain’s context instead of more modern events.) But this movie also opens with deepfake holograms of the Horsemen, who have disbanded since their last great heist. The Gen Z magicians behind the digital curtain are this quasi-legacy sequel’s new cast: impressionist Bosco Leroy (Dominic Sessa), parkour-ing pickpocket June McClure (Ariana Greenblatt), and Charlie (Justice Smith), tech wizard who secretly wants to take the stage. After their stunt with the aforementioned crypto bro, they gain the attention of J. Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg, having fun returning as the cocky genius), who has himself been drawn out of retirement by the Eye for the motherlode of all heists. In contrast to the tiny microchip in Now You See Me 2, the latest target is the Heart Diamond—but also its owner, Veronika Vanderberg (Rosamund Pike), a South African diamond magnate who is offering up her family heirloom to the highest bidder, a.k.a. the richest arms dealer. As Atlas assembles a new Four Horsemen with himself and Bosco squabbling over who’s the leader, it becomes a bigger family reunion as the rest of the former Horsemen join up with their hypnotism, card-throwing, and escape know-how. The elder Horsemen teach the colts some tried-and-true stage magic, while the kiddos prove they have some clever tricks up their own sleeves. It’s fine? It’s fun! But the movie suffers from too much self-awareness; it performs with such hyper-focus on the fact that it’s being watched that it’s more about showing off than about successfully pulling off the trick. The second-act set piece is not as clever as the film thinks it is, more of a detour to a French version of the Winchester Mystery House than anything else. It illustrates how there are simply too many cooks (seven, by that point) to achieve anything more than a couple of punny bits in various trick rooms, though one in particular is fun, especially if you had “Inception fight scene homage” on your Now You See Me bingo card. Not surprisingly, the newbies get more opportunities to show off their group dynamic as well as their individual skillsets, while the old guard gets to resolve some interpersonal issues from the last two movies and the past decade. For a movie co-written by three men, there are some heavy-handed attempts at filling in the blanks regarding the Four Horsemen’s “two girls, one role” between Henley Reeves (Isla Fisher) and Lula May (Lizzie Caplan). With Fisher having had to miss the sequel because of a real-life pregnancy, Henley calls out how her pregnancy forced her to opt out of some of the group’s riskier stunts; there’s almost a point there about a gendered double standard, but it’s gone again like a flick of flash paper. The runner of Lula struggling to catch up with all of the heist’s details and context is wonderfully skewering thanks to Caplan’s delivery; but the other ongoing jokes about the three female magicians starting their own girl group bring us back to the same problem of these women not existing on their own merits.  Meanwhile, Jack Wilder (Dave Franco) and Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson) perform their same old tricks without the fun of Now You See Me 2, in which they traded roles and trained each other on their specialties. And while the younger set’s apathy is understandable—wondering why they should care about a world that doesn’t care about them—the trio has a surprising lack of tension. They tell us that they’re found family, but we don’t really see it in action because there’s so much else going on. Image: Katalin Vermes/Lionsgate There’s been a lot of talk about the moviemakers’ tension with using as many practical effects as possible for their tricks, so that the stage magic can’t just be attributed to movie magic. There are certainly winning moments here that play upon expectations—both the characters’ and the audience’s—to create narrative improbabilities, like a conveniently waiting helicopter as escape route. But then these smaller tricks get thrown back out of balance by the franchise’s need to up the ante with shooting locations. To wit, the final showdown ends up in Abu Dhabi for nothing more than plot reasons (and to show off a cool racecar). Yet the setting is mere spectacle when compared to the Horsemen’s flair for tricking villains into seeing what they want to see. And let me add that Pike is a high point in this film for sheer campiness—her shifting accent, her hatred of (ironically) the camp of magic, her use of tricks against the Horsemen—which makes it all the more fun to see her get taken down. These movies love their complicated magical lineage and secret heirs, and so too do they love their last-minute reveals of masterminds more comfortable with controlling the behind-the-scenes yet able to step into the spotlight when the moment is exquisitely theatrical. It’s no coincidence that in the absence of Mark Ruffalo’s Dylan Shrike—the way in which they write him off-screen is eye-rollingly obvious that it’s just an excuse to save him for the next movie—the movie employs both narrative tricks to much less shocking effect. Now You See Me: Now You Don’t is intended as a hinge point in the franchise, a proof-of-concept that the Horsemen have evolved into something closer to the Avengers, in which four (or more!) magicians at a time can occupy the roles on a rotating basis. And that’s exciting, Horsemen as a career aspiration—or even just a short-term gig before moving on to other performances and/or retirement. The fact that the OG Horsemen leave suburban security or high-paying gigs in order to reunite for old times’ sake shows what a hold that time in their lives has on them. It also leaves the door open for one or more to return for the already-greenlit fourth movie. Horsemen, assemble! There’s a recurring (unintentional?) bit in which Veronika barks “Bring me my heart!”—with at least the audience, if not also her, aware of the irony. She’s so desperate to reclaim this Heart Diamond, intended not for the empty cavity in her own chest but for a vault beneath the Arabian Desert. Yet she still begs, threatens, and bargains for a heart that we all know has nothing to do with love. Now You See Me: Now You Don’t is like that Heart Diamond: it dazzles, but when the sparkles clear from your eyes, there’s nothing left.[end-mark] The post <i>Now You See Me: Now You Don’t</i> Is All Flash and Little Substance appeared first on Reactor.