REVIEW: Now You See Me - clever-clever romp is decent fun on big-screen return

As someone says towards the end of the film, you might just want to know how that was done. Or words to that effect. But don’t worry. The film will show us. This is a film ever eager to show us its own cleverness… but none the less enjoyable for that.

The foursome known as The Horsemen are back nearly a decade after their last adventure – a group of group top illusionists and magicians working at the direction of the mysterious Eye who sends them out on do-good missions, this time a little wealth redistribution.

And so gang leader Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), mentalist Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson), card shafter Jack Wilder (Dave Franco) and escape artist Henley Reeves (Isla Fisher) reconvene. But not before the next generation has deep-faked them with an impressive-take down of a cyber villain in the film’s opening sequence.

Basically the new lot – Bosco (Dominic Sessa), June (Ariana Greenblatt), and Charlie (Justice Smith) – pretend to be the old lot which inevitably attracts the attention of the old lot who are soon roping them in at the Eye’s latest bidding, their task to take down the evil, money-laundering arms dealer Veronika Vanderberg (Rosamund Pike), a baddie with a South African accent as sharp as the diamond she covets. It’s a particularly precious one, and the famous four, now swollen to become the famous seven, have got it in their sights.

Their modus operandi, as ever, is to heap illusion upon illusion in a film where nothing is ever what it seems, where you can’t fully trust anything to be quite what you think you are looking it. It’s convoluted, very convoluted and maybe just a little overimpressed by its own brilliance. But it’s great fun and romps along with its endlessly unpredictable twists and turns, flitting from one glamourous location to the next.

It was never quite going to have the impact of the first film in the franchise all those years ago, but as a third instalment, after so long away, it’s still good to be back in its world.