If Steven Soderbergh’s remake of Ocean’s Eleven attempted to capture some remnant of an older Las Vegas, sounding an elegiac note in its scene of the crew departing the Bellagio fountains one by one, then the Now You See Me series seems to aspire to something closer to the Las Vegas of today. The belated third entry Now You See Me: Now You Don’t swells the ranks of its tricky magician thieves to nearly Ocean’s Eleven numbers, then winds them through a heist plot that ultimately has the illusory spontaneity of a pop artist in the midst of a 30-show residency. It’s glitzy, fun fakery that fades quickly unless you’re an inexplicably hardcore fan.
Those fans will recall that it’s been nearly a decade since the most recent adventures of ringleader Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), mentalist Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson), card trickster Jack Wilder (Dave Franco), and escape artist Henley Reeves (Isla Fisher) at the behest of The Eye, a secret magician society that sends particularly skilled illusionists on righteous, spy-like missions. Actually, it’s been even longer for Henley, who wasn’t in the 2016 sequel unforgivably titled Now You See Me 2, apparently saving its more obvious moniker for this three-quel (and therefore squandering the opportunity to call the new one Now You Three Me). But the estranged quartet calling themselves the Four Horsemen are tricked into a testy reunion when a message from The Eye brings Atlas to the doorstep of a younger trio of similarly gifted magicians: Bosco (Dominic Sessa), June (Ariana Greenblatt), and Charlie (Justice Smith). Their task: steal an enormous diamond from money-laundering arms dealer Veronika Vanderberg (Rosamund Pike), a mission mostly in sync with the new kids’ proclivity for wealth redistribution, albeit more neatly traditional in its choice of evildoer.
