There’s really only one truly magical effect in Now You See Me: Now You Don’t: the accent employed by Rosamund Pike, which seems to be travelling the world quicker than the speed of light.
As silky villain Veronika Vanderberg, who gets to be evil while wearing a stunning evening gown compete with cape (my favourite kind of movie villain), she goes full Streep and then some – sometimes sounding American Southern, sometimes Eastern European, sometimes British, sometimes … well, I have no idea whatsoever, but it was a rich and glorious journey.
Otherwise, what we have here is a fairly uninspired third entry in the Now You See Me franchise, about a group of magicians who band together to pull off complicated heists.
As franchise ideas go, this isn’t a bad one at all – who doesn’t love magicians and heists? – but it’s got a problem.
Magic tricks on screen don’t look like magic tricks, but like camera tricks; movies are, in a sense, already magic, and seeing somebody disappear on screen isn’t remotely as effective as if they’d disappeared live in front of us.
So whether the Horsemen – the four original magicians, played by Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Dave Franco and Isla Fisher – are any good at what they do is a moot point, and drains the movie of much of its potential spark.
This time around, the Horsemen gain three junior magicians (or, as Veronika calls them, “these horsemen and their leetle stablehands”) played by Justice Smith, Dominic Sessa and Ariana Greenblatt, and tackle a heist involving a tennis-ball-sized diamond, a relatively tame car chase and a French château with an upside-down room.
There’s plenty to enjoy: Eisenberg has a lot of scenes in which he wears a hoodie and acts irritable, making me wonder if we’d somehow magically teleported into The Social Network (which would have been a nice trick), and I appreciated everyone’s nifty tearaway heist outfits and the fact that a character is named Bosco Le Roy.
But ultimately, Now You See Me: Now You Don’t is never quite as much fun as you expect it to be, particularly when Pike isn’t on screen.
Despite a character intoning that we all “need magic more than ever,” this movie didn’t have enough of it. Here’s hoping any future sequel features Veronika and her mysterious accent, and is called Now You Hear It, Now You Don’t; now that’s a franchise I can get behind. – By Moira Macdonald/The Seattle Times, via dpa
Summary:
Never quite as much fun as you expect it to be.
