NOW YOU SEE ME: NOW YOU DON'T Review: The Magic's Gone in This Third Act

The first time you pull a rabbit from a hat, everyone applauds.

The second time, they lean forward to see how it's done. By the third, they're checking their watches instead. Now You See Me: Now You Don't keeps waving the same wand, hoping no one notices the magic's gone.

The Now You See Me franchise sounds like the perfect trick on paper. What if the criminals from Ocean's Eleven were magicians instead? Louis Leterrier somehow conjured something charming -- or, at least, amusing -- with Now You See Me in 2013. It introduced us to the Four Horsemen, a group of Robin Hood-esque magicians using sleight of hand to steal from the rich and give to the poor. Jon M. Chu kept the momentum in the somewhat sloppy second iteration. Yet, despite its star-studded cast, Now You See Me 2 felt unrehearsed as it pulled us through a messy plot.

Ruben Flesischer's Now You See Me: Now You Don't juggles all the faults and virtues of the first two films. The tricks and banter drown in their own clutter, with too many ideas and far too little story.

Almost a decade after the last film, Now You See Me: Now You Don't intends to stage a comeback. Flyers for a show featuring the original Four Horsemen -- J. Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson), Jack Wilder (Dave Franco), and Henley Reeves (Isla Fisher) -- are plastered across New York City.

In a Bushwick warehouse, the quartet reemerges in full form. Their latest illusion targets an arrogant tech bro in the audience, siphoning his crypto wallet to redistribute the funds among everyone present. Once again, the money lands in the pockets of the people, before the crowd floods out into the night.

The angry (now-broke) tech guy storms the stage, only to find the whole performance was a sham. In reality, the likenesses of the Four Horsemen were poached for this performance by a trio of Gen-Z magicians: Bosco (Dominic Sessa), June (Ariana Greenblatt), and Charlie (Justice Smith). The movie plays its anti-establishment ethos with a heavy hand, a vain attempt to connect younger audiences to this franchise.

At their secret lair (inside an abandoned Bushwick factory), Atlas is waiting for them: a little peeved this ragtag group stole his identity, but admittedly impressed all the same. He confides in them that he's received a call from the Eye (a secret organization of good-hearted, vigilante magicians), hoping to enlist these amateur magicians to help him pull off an impossible task.

The job: to steal a colossal, heart-shaped diamond from the villainous money launderer and diamond dealer Veronika Vanderberg, played by Rosamund Pike, who sports a bafflingly bad South African accent.

Atlas and his three inductees plot to steal the diamond during a rare public appearance in Antwerp. Each trick plays out without much flair. The problem isn't dull tricks, but the absence of any real stakes to make them matter. What should be a climactic showdown between Atlas, the trio, and Veronica instead limps along. It's capped off by a redundant flashback reveal that adds no flair.

This plan feels half-strung. But they need a reason to reintroduce the other Horsemen. Seeing Franco, Harrelson, and Fisher breathes some life into this undemanding film. Still, it injects the already overcrowded narrative with extra backstories and unexplained tensions.

But this is a reunion tour after all. From here, Now You See Me: Now You Don't tries to hypnotize us with flashy illusions, adrenaline-filled chase sequences, or quippy dialogue from some of the most familiar faces in Hollywood. It almost works when the group -- joined by Morgan Freeman's Thaddeus Bradley -- reunites in a French mansion, but the film never rises above a tedious cat-and-mouse routine, even when it teases life and death.

One of the film's central pillars is the generational divide. Far too much of the dialogue hinges on this, saturated with clichés and Gen-Z slang. Other times, the older generation simply cannot understand the motivations or attitudes of their youthful counterparts. It's painful to watch and clumsily executed, stooping so low as to have Woody Harrelson act shocked when he drinks a spiked seltzer or Jesse Eisenberg get pissy when Bosco responds "cool" to something he says.

It's telling that the best part of this movie is Pike, despite her unbelievable accent. Her ruthless CEO makes her entrance by proving a point about profit, ordering a board member to place a diamond in his mouth to demonstrate how to make an item priceless. If he swallows, it's life or death. Still, like every role and plot in the film, Veronica is underwritten.

In fact, every cast member outperforms the material they're given. The younger actors hold their own against the A-listers, who struggle just as much with the unworkable storylines handed to them. Now You See Me: Now You Don't promises a show with new tricks up its sleeve, but this attempt at a hat trick is nothing more than a botched encore.

The film opens Friday, November 14, only in movie theaters, via Lionsgate. Visit the official site for locations and showtimes.