Magic: The Gathering

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For anyone who reads this newsletter, it probably comes as no surprise to read that I’m probably not the target audience for Now You See Me: Now You Don’t. I didn’t see either of the two previous Now You See Me movies, and in fact, only dimly registered that this latest installment was actually the franchise’s third. In some distant corner of my mind, I vaguely recalled making fun of Now You See Me 2 for not going with the more obvious “Now You Don’t” title. But by the time the franchise rectified this oversight, I had nearly forgotten it existed. Meanwhile, “Now You 3 Me” was right there.

Yes, they’ll make franchises out of any dang thing these days. Believe it or not, the first two Now You See Mes grossed nearly $700 million worldwide, combined. The brainchild of Israeli-American movie multihyphenate Boaz Yakin—the director of Remember The Titans and writer of Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights—among many others, Now You See Me rests on the idea that no one could possibly be better at robbing banks than the world’s best magicians. They’re the masters of illusion, the sultans of subterfuge!

“Point Break, but with magic” is an idea so idiotically brilliant that all Hollywood’s most himbo screenwriters simultaneously burned with envy upon its release. That being said, glossy, twisty, star-studded heist movies bore me to tears on the best of days (I would rather get a root canal than watch the Knives Out movies again), and in my mind the only way to make them more asinine is to introduce a conceit whereby any leap in heist logic can be excused on the grounds of “it’s magic!”

So what was I doing at an advanced screening for a third heist movie about magician bank robbers, you might rightly ask. I can explain: I first moved from LA to Fresno seven years ago, which at the time seemed like no great career sacrifice. Back then, they still held advanced screenings in Fresno. Then the pandemic happened, and screeners became something film critics did at home, and it seemed even less a sacrifice. Then the pandemic ended, and in-person screenings started up again, only now with Fresno left out of the media equation for some reason. I keep pleading with studio publicists to bring them back, even throwing my weight around as a Substack Bestseller™, shockingly to no avail. These days I either see new movies on Thursday nights with the unwashed masses (who are generally still more washed than the crowd at advance screenings, but “screening rats” and “prize piggies” are subjects for another conversation) or drive the three or so hours each way for the earlier San Francisco or LA screenings. Many such sacrifices. On the plus side I have a beautiful family and rarely find myself lost inside the parking garage at the AMC Century City anymore.

All of this is to explain why, when I got one of my first advance screening invites in Fresno in years, and it was for Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, I felt duty bound to attend even if I never would’ve bothered seeing this movie otherwise, if only to justify years of bitching. I even convinced my 12-year-old nephew to come with me. If I wasn’t the target audience for a third sequel to a movie about magician bank robbers, I figured a 12-year-old boy was as close as it gets.

Now You See Me: Now You Don’t (NYSM:NYD) opens with some kind of heist. Or so I gathered. Truth be told, we missed a bit of the first scene. Despite arriving 15 minutes early, we didn’t get to our seats until 11 minutes after start time, thanks to the long line at concessions. I considered bailing, but I worried that forcing a 12-year-old to sit through a magician bank robber movie candy-free might be cause for Child Protective Services to step in. Can’t abra cadabra without Abba Zabba, I always say.

Anyway, I don’t think we missed much. There were three zoomer magic prodigies—played by Justice Smith, Dominic Sessa, and Arianna Greenblatt—returning to their magician loft after successfully pulling off a deepfaked magic show by “The Four Horsemen.” That’s the collective name for the famous magicians from the previous Now You See Mes, played by Jesse Eisenberg, Dave Franco, Woody Harrelson, and Isla Fisher, respectively (an embarrassment of short kings and queens!). They even have their individual roles: Smith is the behind-the-scenes planner (aka The Nerd), Sessa is a Juilliard-dropout acting prodigy skilled in the art of disguise, and Greenblatt excels at sleight of hand. Which, interestingly, often manifests as a facility for doing parkour. Which ever of NYSM: NYD’s four credited screenwriters (along with two others with character credits and another with story) came up with that one deserves a raise.

Inside their magic lair, the Three Sorceketeers find none other than J. Daniel Atlas (Eisenberg) of the Four Horsemen in the flesh! Having infiltrated the Zoomer lair, he’s now skewering their unprofessionalism, but also recruiting them for a big job (classic negging). Apparently there is a mysterious entity known as “The Eye” from the previous movies, a secret collective which recruits promising magicians to steal from the powerful to aid the vulnerable. I gather it’s sort of like the magic loom from Wanted that told the assassins who to kill. But in this case, for good. Not only are they magician bank robbers, apparently they’re like the Dexter of magician bank robbers.

In any case, it is The Eye that has sent J. Daniel Atlas to recruit the three zoomers for a Big Job: stealing the Heart Diamond from an evil diamond company that is actually a front for a global crime syndicate. The evil company’s diamonds allow all the world’s most baddest baddies to launder their ill-gotten gains, led by their evil South African matriarch, Veronika Vanderberg, played by Rosamund Pike.

Like all good members of Gen Y, I have fond memories of the days when most movie bad guys were white South Africans, speaking in revoltingly pinched accents and claiming diplomatic immunity while doing various Nazi-coded things. So for me, Pike’s Afrikanse snarl was a hoot. Every time she hit a hard consonant I wanted to stand up and shout “bling bang!”

The basic pattern of the film goes something like this: there’s a mini heist, which the Three Sorceketeers must try to carry out through a combination of goofy disguises, parkour, and straight up camera tricks. A surprising number of these plans go sideways immediately, leading to car chases, parkour, and fisticuffs, which are apparently also part of a magician’s purview. I dunno, man, I feel like I could probably kick David Copperfield’s ass, but that’s just me. Whatever, I can suspend disbelief. It’s magic!

The ruse will nonetheless be mostly successful, leading to a scene in which the magicians retreat to some drawing room, sharing stories that lead to flashback sequences showing how the tricks we already saw actually worked (“I liked when they explained how they did the tricks, otherwise I would’ve had no idea what happened,” -my nephew). Along the way, magicians from the previous movies are reintroduced, to much audience delight. Heist, explanations, callbacks, repeat. Remember Morgan Freeman? He’s in these too! Can’t make a movie about magic without Morgan Freeman, I always say.

Eventually, all the magicians from the previous movies and the new magicians introduced in this one are finally all together in one place. A sort of Magic: The Gathering, if you will. They’ve teamed up, of course, for one big final heist, which takes place at a big F1 race in Abu Dhabi. Abu Dhabi (as seen in various UFC broadcasts and in Sex and the City 2) almost certainly paid for or incentivized this placement. Or so we’re left to assume from obvious spon-con moments, like Rosamund Pike gesturing grandly to Abu Dhabi’s many wonders, while clipping, “Welcome to Yas Island. It’s the Orlando of the Middle East.”

She intends this as a high compliment, by the way. Presumably the target audience for Now You 3 Me are meant to hear this and think “Another Orlando? How exotic!”

Rosamund Pike’s evil diamond company happens to be sponsoring the F1 race, where they will be unveiling their new company car. F1 superstar Lewis Hamilton makes a cameo. Dominic Sessa steals the racecar at one point and drives it around city streets. All kinds of impossible magic tricks take place, like Dave Franco turning a playing card into a shower of confetti and Isla Fisher transforming her dress into a different dress while it’s still on her body. That bit from Naked Gun, where they coax a confession out of a bad guy using a fake backdrop, which reveals itself to be another fake backdrop, inside another fake backdrop, happens unironically at least three times.

Just when the gang thinks they’ve successfully stolen the diamond, Rosamund Pike, employing Boer treachery, drops them through a trap door into an elaborate murder contraption. The gang find themselves inside a giant glass box as it fills with sand. How will the horsemen get themselves out of this one? Ask Isla Fisher, she’s the escape artist, after all! Eventually she figures that if they can break an overhead pipe, they can soak the sand, making it heavy enough to break the glass and free the horseman. She references a famous stunt in which something like this happened, with the wet sand and the glass breaking and whatnot.

I can’t imagine they expected many people to catch this reference, but for some reason I know this stunt — that it was the “Amazing” Joe Burrus, an aspiring Houdini who had planned to escape from a plastic-glass coffin buried under two feet of cement. He ended up dying when the cement proved heavier than expected and shattered the coffin. It all happened on Halloween night (the same day Houdini died), 1990, in Fresno, California, with all of his family and assistants standing around. This awful image has stuck with me all these years, for obvious reasons.

All of which left me wondering: was it just weird coincidence that the one of the first Fresno screenings in years contained this odd, incredibly obscure Fresno reference? Or had some brilliant publicist or studio marketing person noted the connection and tried to make the most of it? I’m guessing it had to be the first, but still: pretty weird. Almost as weird as the Houdini wannabe dying on the same day as Houdini.