Now You See Me: Now You Don't Movie Review: Nails the reunion, but bungles the rune

The illusionists-cum-Robin Hoods are back. Now You See Me: Now You Don't would have been a lot better if The Horsemen had shaken off their retirement just for another wealth redistribution assignment. But the Ruben Fleischer directorial plans to expand The Horsemen and make it more about the initiation of the newbies by the old-timers, thereby missing the trick of the first two movies.

The third installment of the Now You See Me franchise begins with a highly anticipated magic show by the quartet (with Henley, not Lula) after a decade of The Horsemen's disappearance, where a crypto higgler gets a taste of his own medicine. Shortly after the heist-upon-invitation, we learn that The Horsemen are still in hibernation, and the show was the handiwork of their fan trio: Charlie (Justice Smith), June (Ariana Greenblatt), and Bosco LeRoy (Dominic Sessa). But this act forces J Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), Henley Reeves (Isla Fisher), Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson), and Jack Wilder (Dave Franco) to breach their sabbatical, where a new assignment awaits them.

The Fast and Furious/Mission: Impossible treatment accorded to the reunion of the magicians worked. However, making the whole proceedings look more physical drains the film of its soul. There are aspects in the film that go against the fundamentals that added charm to the first two movies. The stunt sequence set inside the police station and the Yas Island car chase weren't shoddy, but misplaced. The writing disregards almost all the strengths of the previous movies.

Another new entrant in the Now You See Me franchise is Rosamund Pike, who plays the suave capitalist antagonist Veronika Vanderberg, the matriarch of a diamond establishment used as a front for money laundering. You get reminded of Amy Dunne (Gone Girl) as Pike effortlessly channels that speciously nice and kind rich person, who transforms into something despicable once she is no longer noticed. But unfortunately, the ravishness Pike brings to the table alone didn't make Veronika worth remembering. She doesn't employ a tenth of her clout; she claims she has to ground the eight-member (Lizzy Caplan's Lula May joins by now) or nine-member (Morgan Freeman's Thaddeus makes a brief appearance) crew of conjurers. Her undoing, not the character's defeat but the writing employed in it, comes in the form of the famous final trick, a person. The flippantness with which the magnificence of the final trick and the big reveal that follows was unforgivable. The earlier films would have succeeded in convincing why the antagonists missed seeing the trick. But this film vainly sells that the antagonist, let alone an opulent diamond heiress who can summon the who's who of the world, lacks even the basic visual faculty of not noticing something in her close quarters, so crucial for the public image she has been anxiously engineering over the years.

Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Dave Franco, Rosamund Pike, Isla Fisher, Justice Smith, Dominic Sessa, Ariana Greenblatt

Director: Ruben Fleischer

The franchise thrived on our willingness to suspend our disbelief, but Now You See Me: Now You Don't pushes it to the breaking point. That's not all. The writers also commit the cardinal sin of questioning the immutability and omnipotence of The Eye. This choice is a telltale of how much help the new team has borrowed from the first two movies.

Despite all of these factors undercutting the necessity of a third movie, it was a delight to watch the snarky dynamics between the OG Horsemen after over a decade. Their coming together felt organic and was celebratory. The entrance of each member of the quartet had a zing to it. The back and forth between the old and the new members was enjoyable. Scenes, initially suggesting that The Eye may have just found the replacement to The Horsemen, suddenly turn on its face, shifting hollers into woots. Every dip in the narration is balanced by one or all of The Horsemen. The humour owing to the generational gap is patchy. It is fun where it works, but also isn't intolerable where it doesn't. But these initiation spaces also get a bit touchy when the illusionists begin discussing what they were doing after the events of the 2016 film. They were the characters who didn't require a lot of substantiation for doing what they did, and yet we were never dismissive of their improbable feats. There is something romantic and poetic about them unmasking the powerful people to the public while masking their private lives, which made us adore and embrace their enigma. Venturing more into the lives of The Horsemen and the rookies comes off as a confession that the writers have no tricks up their sleeves.

Now You See Me: Now You Don't feels like a happy reunion of a bunch of magicians who deceive, using illusion, the deceptive who concentrate wealth to themselves and continue to have people run the rat-race they have been running since the beginning of civilisation. But unfortunately, the movie offers nothing more. The new-gen Horsemen-to-be display no idiosyncrasies of their predecessors. This raises serious doubts about the franchise’s future. The question of whether the trio can carry forward from where the quartet—or even the quintet—left off lingers as the camera closes in on Eisenberg and Smith. This zooming-in technique also functions as a meta storytelling device, not to a pleasing effect. Of the other holy-cows in the franchise that the film defies, it dares to give a peek into the lives of The Horsemen, who have been subjecting themselves to diminution under the spectacle they conjure, only to prove the opening lines of Danny in the first film - The Closer You Look, The Less You See.