Jonah Naplan   November 15, 2025

The “Now You See Me” movies have very appropriately been described as “Fast & Furious With Magic” in the throwaway but often massively entertaining way that they cast major actors as showy, deceptive figures who treat sleight-of-hand tricks with the same theatrics as they would a car chase or an escape from an exploding building. It’s largely been a second-tier franchise for years, having not put out a new movie in nearly a decade, and has lacked much of a passionate fanbase clamoring for more content. “Did you think we abandoned you?” teases Jesse Eisenberg’s J. Daniel Atlas, the ringleader of the magician quartet, the Four Horsemen, at the beginning of “Now You See Me: Now You Don’t,” the franchise’s return to the big screen. Before long, all the players get reintroduced, the plot is set into motion, and the movie gets going as if barely any time had passed at all.

“Now You Don’t” is acutely and unabashedly aware of its existence as a “legacyquel.” Almost immediately, it establishes a group of sort-of “Junior Horsemen,” who have obviously been passed the baton to carry this franchise on their backs into the next decade. The appointees include Charlie (Justice Smith), June (Ariana Greenblatt), and Bosco Leroy (Dominic Sessa, in his first role since the excellent “The Holdovers”), a trio of quick-witted geniuses who have been deep-faking and staging Horsemen shows while the real group has been split up on leave. Woody Harrelson’s wily mentalist Merritt McKinney, Dave Franco’s cunning card master Jack Wilder, and Isla Fisher’s daring escape artist Henley Reeves, along with Eisenberg’s Atlas, reunite when they’re summoned once more by The Eye, a secret society of magicians who are essentially the illusionist version of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Their mission this time around is to steal the largest diamond in the world, currently in the hands of South African crime syndicate big bad Veronika Vanderberg (Rosamund Pike). Like the villains in the other “Now You See Me” movies, Vanderberg’s organization has been scamming innocent civilians out of their money and reaping the benefits. A secondary goal of the Horsemen’s magic has always been to exploit those sharks, often defaming them in front of the whole crowd while simultaneously hacking into their bank accounts to reimburse the people who were cheated. They’re kind of modern superheroes in this way. And of course, the Horsemen will do the same thing again in this third installment.

Directed by Ruben Fleischer (“Zombieland,” “Uncharted,” “Venom”), working from a screenplay by Michael Lesslie, Paul Wernick, Rhett Reese, and Seth Grahame-Smith, “Now You See Me: Now You Don’t” has all the charms of the first two movies without doing much of anything new or original. Indeed, we’ve seen a lot of these familiar beats and clichés before, both in this franchise and in other franchises like the “Mission: Impossible” series, the “Ocean’s” trilogy (the “Now You See Me” formula of breaking down how the Horsemen pulled off the heist through an electric montage at the end feels directly derived), and all sorts of Jason Statham and Guy Ritchie action outings. But by the end, you’ll probably have enough of a good time that these retroddings won’t matter much.

Fleischer stages a handful of neat sequences throughout that might stick with you for a full week at most, unlike the rest of the movie which will evaporate from memory the second you get home from the theater. The Horsemen’s retreat to a magic safehouse, maintained by former magician-turned-debunker Thaddeus Bradley (Morgan Freeman in a brief appearance) has the ideal energy and tone for this light-footed franchise as each character attempts to one-up each other with their brand of magic. Their whimsy turns into chaos when law enforcement descends on the scene and the group splits up, dashing into room after room of nifty tricks and gimmicks—one appears to be upside down, while another is a maze of mirrors, and another is a forced perspective “Ames” illusion.

The way that these movies stage action and heist sequences, marrying dazzling cinematography with a propulsive score by Brian Tyler, is often wildly entertaining, and “Now You Don’t” has some of the better examples of this. But, it being a third movie, it also falls into the classic trap of having too many characters and jumbling up each of their motives or where they are at any given moment (the late arrival of another familiar face complicates matters further), which makes many of the big ensemble sequences confusing. Related to that, the movie also continues the “Now You See Me” tradition of wrapping up with a third act twist so totally bombastic and left field that you might wonder if the writers completely ran out of ideas.

All of that to say, the constant charm of the whole cast leaves “Now You Don’t” on a good note. The four original leads could do one of these movies in their sleep by now, particularly Eisenberg and Harrelson, whose classic charms allow them to easily slip back into their characters after ten years, but the three newbies surprisingly hold their own against these genre masters. Pike’s pretty solid, too, even if her material is largely one-dimensional and borders on bland. The arbitrary “movie magic”—sort of an uncanny foil for the real illusions a magician might perform onstage—is all competent, finding amusing ways to awe the audience through editing and special effects.

If this movie does well, there will probably be future “Now You See Me”s to come, likely saddled with more characters, twists, turns, and illusions, and I’d rather have that than 100 new sequels of other things. Still, more wonder would always be found exploring the nooks and crannies of a real magic store than the digital illusions generated here.

Now playing in theaters.