A filmed record of stage magic doesn\u2019t make a lot of sense, if you think about it. An illusionist needs a live audience to conjure deep feelings of mystery and wonder, because it\u2019s all happening in the room right in front of you, and you can study the performers and the stage to try to figure out how they did the tricks\u2014and be delightfully mystified when you can\u2019t. In movies (and on TV), the magic tricks themselves can\u2019t actually impress you, because editing and visual effects can do just about anything.<\/p>\n
That means that the only magic trick left is staying a step ahead of the plot guessers in the audience whose main source of pleasure is figuring out where things are going before the movie gets there. To its credit, the \u201cNow You See Me<\/a>\u201d trilogy, about magic experts tricking powerful bad guys, understands this principle, and conveys it with humor and a light touch. That understanding plus a strong cast are the only things preventing the films from turning into jumbled giant bags of arbitrary plot twists, so eager to outsmart viewers that they turn into nonsense.<\/p>\n The third entry in the series, \u201cNow You See Me: Now You Don\u2019t,\u201d stays on the right side of that risk as it reintroduces the Four Horsemen, a quartet of conjurers and other tricksters, and throws them into a plot to steal the world\u2019s biggest diamond. Jesse Eisenberg<\/a>\u2018s J. Daniel Atlas, the erstwhile leader of the group, is even more confidently forceful now (Eisenberg has aged out of wunderkind arrogance, his onscreen superpower in films like \u201cThe Social Network\u201d and Zack Snyder\u2019s DC films, and into something more grounded). As in the other movies, a lot of the fun comes from watching his equally egotistical team resist his authority, bicker, and insult each other. It\u2019s all overseen by new-to-the-series director Ruben Fleischer<\/a> (reunited with his \u201cZombieland\u201d stars) and four credited writers. The team tries to balance giving audiences something old and something new, while simultaneously laying track for the series to continue with younger characters if the returning players get tired or ask too much money to appear in a fourth installment.<\/p>\n The aforementioned huge diamond is the property of glamorous international crime syndicate boss Veronika Vanderberg (Rosamund Pike<\/a>), a South African. In this one, the ever-morphing quartet is rounded out by Woody Harrelson<\/a>\u2018s porkpie-hatted mentalist Merritt McKinney; Dave Franco<\/a>\u2018s card shark Dave Wilder; and Isla Fisher<\/a> (who replaced Lizzy Caplan in the second movie as the group\u2019s sole female member) as Henley Reeves, an escapologist who used to be Danny\u2019s assistant and girlfriend. Morgan Freeman<\/a> makes as brief return appearance as Thaddeus Bradley, the retired ex-magician turned debunker, and once the Grandmaster of The Eye, the secret society that has (some) authority over the Horsemen. And there are some other surprise appearances that we won\u2019t divulge here, even though they\u2019re listed on IMDb.<\/p>\n The opening sequence seems like an anniversary celebration of the Horsemen\u2019s founding but turns into a debut for a trio whose illusions are in service of charity and social activism: Justice Smith\u2019s Charlie, Ariana Greenblatt\u2019s June, and Dominic Sessa\u2019s Bosco Leroy. After the trio outs a crypto huckster and redistributes his wealth, Danny is so impressed that he recruits them to join the Horsemen in a mission to Antwerp, where Veronika is cultivating her network of diamond aficionados to maintain her real business, money laundering, and steal the diamond, which is displayed to wow the crowd.<\/p>\n From there, it turns into an everything-plus-the-kitchen sink comic thriller where the seeming pinball-machine randomness of the story evokes the Pink Panther films and Bob Hope and Bing Crosby\u2019s \u201cRoad\u201d series more so than a standard heist picture. It doesn\u2019t add up to much, and it evaporates from the mind as soon as it\u2019s over, but that was true of the other two movies, which made over $700 million globally despite mostly lukewarm reviews. At a time when nothing but familiar IP films seem to be able to get any traction (\u201cSinners\u201d notwithstanding), that\u2019s another kind of magic trick.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A filmed record of stage magic doesn\u2019t make a lot of sense, if you think about it. 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