Movie Review: Now You See Me 3

The original Now You See Me was a sensational magic movie that won over audiences with its stylish tricks and clever camera work. What made it stand out wasn’t just the illusions themselves, but the way the film visually performed the magic for us. The camera seemed to move like a magician’s hand—directing our attention, hiding information, and then revealing it at just the right moment.

Because of that, I walked into the theater for Now You See Me: Now You Don’t with genuine excitement. I’m usually very generous when it comes to story choices or visual effects; as long as a film maintains its own logic and world, I tend to accept what it tries to do. But this time, I walked out thinking, “What just happened?”

In this blog, I want to explore why this third installment felt so uninteresting to me, despite having all the technical ingredients of a strong magic movie.

To be fair, the magic itself is not the problem. The camera work in Now You See Me: Now You Don’t is, in many ways, as sophisticated as ever. The tricks are intricate and detailed, and the way they’re framed and edited often feels smooth and precise. You can see the effort put into designing illusions that are visually impressive and carefully choreographed for the screen.

One scene that really shows how well the film handles magic on screen is the fight between the police and the Horsemen inside the house. This sequence moves through a spinning room, an optical illusion room, and finally a mirror room. In the spinning room, the camera rotates with the set, making it genuinely difficult to tell which way is “up.” The Horsemen and the officers are thrown around together, but while the police look confused and unbalanced, the Horsemen move with the rotation as if they’ve rehearsed it a hundred times. The result is a visually disorienting moment where the environment itself becomes part of the trick.

The transition into the optical illusion room continues this idea. The perspective shifts, walls don’t seem to line up, and distances become hard to judge. The camera glides through this space in a way that exaggerates the distortion, almost inviting the audience to get lost alongside the characters. Finally, in the mirror room, reflections multiply and overlap. Here, the framing becomes tighter and more controlled, cutting between angles that hide and reveal the Horsemen at just the right moments. We’re never completely sure who is real and who is just a reflection until the action resolves.

Even though I was disappointed by the film overall, this sequence reminded me why I liked the franchise in the first place. For a few minutes, I felt the old Now You See Me energy return: the sense that space, perspective, and camera movement could all be part of one big, carefully planned illusion. In that moment, I was fully absorbed, trying to keep track of the real bodies in a maze of spinning rooms and mirrors, while the film stayed one step ahead of me.

One of the core appeals of the original Now You See Me films was their “Robin Hood” identity. The Horsemen weren’t just flashy magicians; they operated with a clear moral frame: Steal from the corrupt and redistribute to those who had been wronged.

This gave the franchise a strong thematic anchor. The audience could root for the Horsemen not only because they were clever, but because their tricks were tied to a sense of justice. The magic had purpose.

In Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, that identity feels almost completely erased. Instead of a story about outsmarting powerful, unethical figures for the sake of some greater

good, the plot centers on the revenge of a single kid. This kid manipulates the legendary Horsemen—who were once positioned as almost mythic figures—into helping him achieve his personal vendetta.

For me, this shift drastically lowers the “phase” or stature of the Horsemen. Rather than masterminds with their own agenda, they become tools in someone else’s revenge plot. What feels even stranger is their reaction. If the Horsemen had clearly expressed discomfort or resistance to being used this way, it might have opened up an interesting conflict about ethics and control. Instead, by the end they are simply clapping and celebrating the kid’s success.

That moment was where the film lost me the most. It felt like the series had abandoned its original moral direction without offering anything equally compelling in its place. The “Robin Hood” heart of the franchise was replaced by a much smaller, more personal motivation that didn’t justify the scale or intensity of what was happening on screen.

The second major issue, for me, was the way the film handled the contrast between the younger generation (often framed as “Gen Z”) and the older generation. Rather than creating a nuanced tension between tradition and innovation, the movie seemed to force a shallow conflict: a kind of magic battle between “the cool young ones” and “the outdated older ones.”

This generational framing could have been interesting. The idea of younger magicians using new technology, social media, or different cultural values to challenge older systems has a lot of potential. It could raise questions about who gets to define what “real” magic is, or how power shifts between generations.

Instead, the execution felt immature. The contrast between the young and old characters often came off as exaggerated and cartoonish, as if the film was trying too hard to be trendy and youth-oriented. The result was a tone that felt more childish than clever. Rather than adding depth to the story, the generational angle flattened it into a simple “old vs. young” setup, without much to say beyond that.

For a franchise that once felt sharp and stylish, this shift in tone was disappointing. It made the film feel less like a sophisticated heist-magic thriller and more like a loud, simplified version of itself.

In the end, Now You See Me: Now You Don’t had all the surface-level elements I would normally enjoy: stylish camera work, complex tricks, and a familiar cast of characters I had once rooted for. But the deeper layers—the moral identity of the story, the role of the Horsemen, and the way generational conflict was portrayed—felt misaligned with what made the franchise appealing in the first place.

For me, a great Now You See Me film needs more than just impressive illusions. It needs a clear sense of who the Horsemen are and why their magic matters. The third film, unfortunately, replaced that sense of purpose with a narrow revenge story and a forced generational clash. The result was a movie that looked like Now You See Me, but didn’t feel like it.

That is why Now You See Me: Now You Don’t ended up being so unappealing to me. It wasn’t that the magic disappeared—it was that the meaning behind the magic did.