Ten years or so between installments of a successful Hollywood franchise is a lifetime. When it comes to the third “Now You See Me” movie — poof! — time doesn’t matter. These magicians still got it.
“Now You See Me: Now You Don’t” does what sequels apparently must do these days — load up the characters, return to favorite bits and go global — but nails the trick, a crowd-pleasing return that already has a fourth in the works.
“It is very good to be back,” says Jesse Eisenberg as the egotistical, perfectionist J. Daniel Atlas, the brains behind the magician-robber outfit. It’s hard to argue with that sentiment on the strength of this outing, directed with assurance by Ruben Fleischer.
“Now You See Me: Now You Don’t” acts as a sort of pivot, bringing back the veterans — all of them, in various forms — as well as introducing three Gen Z eat-the-rich magicians played by Dominic Sessa, Justice Smith and Ariana Greenblatt. They’re clearly the future. It’s in good (sleight of) hands.
The movie starts off with a clever rip-off of nasty crypto bros in Brooklyn and expands to scenes in Belgium, the United Arab Emirates, France and South Africa. It’s got Nazis, “Harry Potter” vibes and some Louvre museum heist energy. We didn’t need the F1 chase through Abu Dhabi, but no one’s complaining.
The original Four Horsemen — Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Dave Franco and Isla Fisher — are supplemented by Lizzy Caplan, who had replaced Fisher in the second installment. Morgan Freeman returns as the gravel-voiced mentor.
Rosamund Pike in “Now You See Me: Now You Don’t.” (Katalin Vermes/Lionsgate via AP)
Rosamund Pike in “Now You See Me: Now You Don’t.” (Katalin Vermes/Lionsgate via AP)
The prize at the movie’s heart is a diamond — but no mere bauble. It’s the Heart Diamond, the largest ever discovered, with a price tag of half a billion dollars. It’s the size of a smoked turkey leg.
The diamond is owned by a particularly vile South African diamond mine scion who uses her ultra-wealth to launder money for warlords and arms dealers. She is played deliciously by Rosamund Pike with a snide disdain and a nifty Afrikaner accent.
The secretive magic society known as The Eye unites the old Horsemen and the new trio (the Three Ponies?) to steal the diamond, stored in one of those multilevel, biometric “Mission: Impossible”-style bunkers.
Capturing it won’t enhance their bank statements. Remember, they’re all really anti-capitalist, share-the-wealth magicians — most likely democratic socialists, in vogue right now. “This is a chance to drive a stake through the devil herself,” Eisenberg’s character says.
Hollywood is funny that way, creating a multimillion-dollar franchise on the back of heroic left-wing activist characters and convincing the UAE to set it on their streets.
Dominic Sessa, Justice Smith and Ariana Greenblatt in “Now You See Me: Now You Don’t.” (Katalin Vermes/Lionsgate via AP)
Dominic Sessa, Justice Smith and Ariana Greenblatt in “Now You See Me: Now You Don’t.” (Katalin Vermes/Lionsgate via AP)
At first, it’s hard, with eight heroes rushing around, to figure out the primary dynamics. The older Horsemen are strangely muted here — except for Caplan, a hoot — and the young need some seasoning. Intergenerational bickering keeps the movie alive.
There’s a quick stop at a French chateau where some real magic takes place, literally. The last two “Now You See Me” installments got very green-screen and CGI when it came to effects, but the third very refreshingly steps back into old-fashioned trickery. In a single take, we see each of the heroes try to top the others with a card trick, misdirection or illusion.
There’s also a hall of mirrors, an upside-down room, an infinity staircase, a perspective-warping room and a nifty escape from a chamber filling with sand. Kudos to the filmmakers for embracing physical tricks over digital trickery. Also, cute use of Lady Gaga’s “Abracadabra.”
All this leads to a huge showdown between the diamond princess and our motley magicians. You won’t guess who’s been pulling the strings all this time. Seriously, you won’t. And a new generation of magician-thieves are minted. That was a hard trick to pull off.
“Now You See Me: Now You Don’t,” a Lionsgate release in theaters Friday, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for some strong language, violence and suggestive references. Running time: 112 minutes. Three stars out of four.
For those who applaud it, any contempt expressed for the latest iteration of Mean Girls is likely to be met with the ageist rebuke of how it’s probably because you’re a millennial (granted, some millennials might be enough of a traitor to their own birth cohort to lap up this schlock). As in: “Sorry you don’t like it, bitch, but it’s Gen Z’s turn now. You’re just jealous.” The thing is, there’s not anything to be jealous of here, for nothing about this film does much to truly challenge or reinvent the status quo of the original. Which, theoretically, should be the entire point of redoing a film. Especially a film that has been so significant to pop culture. And not just millennial pop culture, but pop culture as a whole. Mean Girls, indeed, has contributed an entire vocabulary and manner of speaking to the collective lexicon. Of course, reinventing the wheel might be the expectation if this was a truly new version. Instead, it is merely a translation of the Broadway musical that kicked off in the fall of 2017, right as another cultural phenomenon was taking shape: the #MeToo movement.
This alignment with the repackaging of Mean Girls as something that a new generation could latch onto and relate with seemed timely for the heralding of a new era that not only abhorred flagrant sexual abuse against women, but also anything unpleasant whatsoever. It quickly became clear that a lot of things could be branded as “unpleasant.” Even some of the most formerly minute “linguistic nuances.” This would soon end up extending to any form of “slut-shaming” or “body-shaming.” Granted, Fey was already onto slut-shaming being “over” when she tells the junior class in the original movie, “You all have got to stop calling each other sluts and whores. It just makes it okay for guys to call you sluts and whores.” (They still seem to think it’s okay, by the way.)
Having had such “foresight,” Fey was also game to update and tweak a lot of other “problematic” things. From something as innocuous as having Karen say that Gretchen gets diarrhea on a Ferris wheel instead of at a Barnes & Noble (clearly, not relevant enough anymore to a generation that gets any reading advice from “BookTok”) to removing dialogue like, “I don’t hate you because you’re fat. You’re fat because I hate you” to doing away entirely with that plotline about Coach Carr (now played by Jon “Don Draper” Hamm) having sexual relationships with underage girls.
What Fey has always been super comfortable with (as most people have been), however, is ageist humor (she has plenty of anti-Madonna lines to that effect throughout 30 Rock). For example, rather than Gretchen (Bebe Wood) telling her friends that “fetch” is British slang like she does in 2004, she muses that she thinks she saw it in an “old movie,” “maybe Juno.” Because yes, everything and everyone is currently “old” in Gen Z land, though 2007 (the year of Juno’s release) was seventeen years ago, not seventy. This little dig at “old movies” is tantamount to that moment in 2005’s Monster-in-Law when Viola Fields (Jane Fonda) has to interview a pop star (very clearly modeled after Britney Spears) named Tanya Murphy (Stephanie Turner) for her talk show, Public Intimacy. Finding it difficult to relate to Tanya, Viola briefly brightens when the Britney clone says, “I love watching really old movies. They’re my favorite.” Viola nudges, “Really? Which ones?” Tanya then pulls a “Mean Girls 2024 Gretchen” by replying, “Well, um, Grease and Grease II. Um, Benji, I love Benji. Free Willy, um, Legally Blonde…uh The Little Mermaid.” By the time Tanya says Legally Blonde (four years “old” at the time of Monster-in-Law’s release), that’s about as much as Viola can take before she’s set off (though Tanya blatantly showcasing her lack of knowledge about Roe v. Wade is what, at last, prompts Viola’s physical violence). Angourie Rice, who plays a millennial in Senior Year, ought to have said something in defense of Juno, but here she’s playing the inherently ageist Gen Zer she is. Albeit a “geriatric” one who isn’t quite passing for high school student age. Not the way Rachel McAdams did at twenty-five while filming Mean Girls.
To that point, Lindsay Lohan was seventeen years old during the production and theater release of Mean Girls, while Angourie Rice was twenty-two (now twenty-three upon the movie’s theater release). Those five years make all the difference in lending a bit more, shall we say, authenticity to being a teenager. Mainly because, duh, Lohan was an actual teenager. And yes, 2004 was inarguably the height of her career success. Which is why she clings on to Mean Girls at every opportunity (complete with the Mean Girls x Wal-Mart commercial). Thus, it was no surprise to see her “cameo” by the end of the film, where she takes on the oh so significant role of Mathlete State Championship moderator, given a few notable lines (e.g., “Honey, I don’t know your life”—something that would have landed better coming from Samantha Jones) but largely serving as a reminder of how much better the original Mean Girls was and that the viewer is currently watching a dual-layered helping of, “Oh how the mighty have fallen.”
While the musical angle is meant to at least faintly set the 2024 film edition apart from the original, it’s clear that Tina Fey, from her schizophrenic viewpoint as a Gen Xer, has trouble toeing the line between post-2017 “sensitivity” and maintaining the stinging tone of what was allowed by 2004 standards. Although Gen Z is known for being “bitchy” and speaking in a manner that echoes the internet-speak amalgam of gay men meets AAVE, any attempt at “biting cuntery” is in no way present at the same level it was in 2004’s Mean Girls. And a large part of that isn’t just because “you can’t say shit anymore,” but also because the meanness of the original Regina George is completely washed out and muted. This compounded by the fact that Reneé Rapp is emblematic of a more “body positive” Regina. In other words, she’s more zaftig than the expected Barbie shape of millennial Regina. Perhaps this is why any acerbic comments on Regina’s part about other people’s looks are noticeably lacking. For example, in the original, Regina tells Cady over the phone, in reference to Gretchen (Lacey Chabert), “Cady, she’s not pretty. I mean, that sounds bad, but whatever.” Regina might say the same of the downgraded looks of the Mean Girls cast as a whole… Let’s just say, gone are the days of the polish and glamor once present in teen movies. And yet, there is still nothing “real” about what’s presented here in Mean Girls 2024. Because, again, it struggles too much with the balancing act of trying to be au courant with the fact that it was created during a time when people (read: millennials) could withstand such patent “meanness.”
In the climate of now, where bullying is all but a criminal offense resulting in severe punishment, Mean Girls no longer fits in the high school narrative of the present. This is something that the aforementioned Senior Year gets right when Stephanie (Rebel Wilson) returns to high school as thirty-seven-year-old and finds that Gen Z seems to care little about the rules of social hierarchy she knew so well as a teenage millennial. And the rules Regina George’s mom likely knew as well. Alas, Mrs. George becomes a pale imitation of Amy Poehler’s rendering, with Busy Philipps trying her best to make the role “frothy,” even when she warns Regina and co. to enjoy their youth because it will never get any better than it is right now for them (something Gen Z clearly believes based on an obsession with people being “old” that has never been seen to this extent before). The absence of her formerly blatant boob job also seems to be an arbitrary “fix” to the previous standards of beauty that were applauded and upheld in the Mean Girls of 2004 (hell, even the “fat girl” who sees Regina has gained some extra padding on her backside is the first to mock her by shouting in front of everyone, “Watch where you’re going, fat ass!”).
To boot, the curse of having to “update” things automatically entails the presence of previously unavailable technology. This, of course, takes away from the bombastic effect of Regina scattering photocopies of the Burn Book pages throughout the entire school, instead placing the book in the entry hallway to be “discovered.” And yes, the fact that the Gen Z Plastics would be using a tactile object such as this is given a one-line explanation by Regina when she asks if they made the book during the week their phones were taken away. Again proving how this “translation” doesn’t hold the same weight (no fat-shaming pun intended) or impact as before.
More vexingly still, without the indelible voiceovers from Cady, the movie becomes a hollow shell of itself, and not just because it’s now a musical lacking the punch of, at the very least, some particularly memorable lyrics (and no, “Not My Fault” playing in the credits isn’t much of a prime example of that either). And so, those who remember the gold standard of the original movie will have to settle for conjuring up the voiceovers themselves while watching (e.g., “I know it may look like I’d become a bitch, but that was only because I was acting like a bitch” and “I could hear people getting bored with me. But I couldn’t stop. It just kept coming up like word vomit”). But perhaps Fey felt that the “storytelling device” of Janis ʻImi’ike (Auliʻi Cravalho)—formerly Janis Ian—and Damian Hubbard (Jaquel Spivey)—formerly just Damian—telling it through what is presumed to be a TikTok video (this, like Senior Year, mirroring a trope established by Easy A) would be enough to both “modernize” the movie (along with Cady being raised by a single mom instead of two married parents) and compensate for its current lack of signature voiceovers.
Some might point out that there’s simply no room for voiceovers in a musical without making the whole thing too clunky. Which brings one to the question of why a musical version instead of a more legitimate reboot had to be made. Well, obviously, the answer is: money. Knowing that the same financial success of the musical would be secured by an effortless transition to film. One that ageistly promises in the trailer: “Not your mother’s Mean Girls.” Apart from the fact that it doesn’t deliver at all on any form of “raunch” that might be entailed by that tagline, as Zing Tsjeng of The Guardian pointed out, “Your mother’s? Tina Fey’s teen comedy was released nineteen years ago. Unless my mother was a child bride, I’m not sure the marketing department thought this one through.”
But of course they did. And what they thought was, “Let’s throw millennials under the bus like Regina and focus our money-making endeavors on a fresher audience.” That fresh audience being totally unschooled in the ways in which Mean Girls is a product of its time. And so, is it really supposed to be “woke” to change the indelible “fugly slut” line to “fugly cow”? As though fat-shaming is more acceptable than slut-shaming (which also occurs when Karen [Avantika] is derided by both Regina and Gretchen for having sex with eleven different “partners”—the implication perhaps being that maybe some of them weren’t boys). And obviously, Regina saying, “I know what homeschool is, I’m not retarded” had to go. The phrase “social suicide” is also apparently out (even though Olivia Rodrigo is happy to reference it in “diary of a homeschooled girl”). In general, all “strong” language has been eradicated. Something that becomes particularly notable in the “standoff” scene between Janis and Cady after the former catches her having a party despite saying she would be out of town. In this manifestation of the fight, gone are the harshly-delivered lines, “You’re a mean girl, Cady. You’re a bitch!”
Despite its thud-landing delivery, the messaging of Mean Girls remains the same. Or, to quote the original Cady (evidently an honorary Gen Zer with this zen anti-bullying stance), “Making fun of Caroline Krafft wouldn’t stop her from beating me in this contest. Calling somebody else fat won’t make you any skinnier, calling someone stupid doesn’t make you any smarter. And ruining Regina George’s life definitely didn’t make me any happier. All you can do in life is try to solve the problem in front of you.” Alas, Fey doesn’t solve the problem of bridging millennial pop culture into what little there is of Gen Z’s. At the end of Mean Girls 2024, the gist of Cady’s third-act message becomes (as said by Janis): “Even if you don’t like someone, chances are they still want to just coexist. So get off their dick.”
The thing is, Mean Girls 2024 can’t coexist (at least not on the same level) with Mean Girls. It’s almost like Cady Heron trying to be the new Regina George. That is to say, it just doesn’t work, and ends up backfiring spectacularly (though not from a financial standpoint, which is all that ultimately matters to most). Unfortunately, when Cady tells Damian at the end of 2004’s Mean Girls, “Hey, check it out. Junior Plastics” and then gives the voiceover, “And if any freshmen tried to disturb that peace…well, let’s just say we knew how to take care of it [cue the fantasy of the school bus running them over],” she added, “Just kidding.” And she was. Otherwise the so-called junior Plastics of Mean Girls 2024 wouldn’t be here, disturbing the millennial peace.
The Friends star died so young at just 54 years old, robbing the world of any more brilliant performances. The biggest tragedy, though, was that the lovelorn comic genius never found his one true love.
But he certainly tried! Perry dated some of the most beautiful and talented women in the world — so many you may even have missed some!
Get the full list of his complicated dating history below…
Gwyneth Paltrow
(c) WENN
This was one that really caught us off guard!
Matthew Perry wrote about having a little summer fling with Gwyneth Paltrow in his tell-all, back before they were both huge stars! She revealed more about it in her tribute to him, writing:
“I met Matthew Perry in 1993 at the Williamstown Theater Festival in Massachusetts. We were both there for most of the summer doing plays. He was so funny and so sweet and so much fun to be with. We drove out to swim in creeks, had beers in the local college bar, kissed in a field of long grass. It was a magical summer.”
Just over a year later he would be a household name on Friends — and so would she soon enough, thanks to roles in films like Seven.
Julia Roberts
(c) WENN
Julia was already one of the biggest movie stars in the world when Matthew reached out to her. They had a before-its-time romance, using fax machines back and forth all day to essentially text one another in 1995! After speaking on the phone for the first time — for five hours straight — they knew it was the real deal.
As big a deal as it was in the media, the relationship sadly only lasted about six months. Perry blames himself entirely; he wrote in his memoir, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing:
“Dating Julia Roberts had been too much for me. I had been constantly certain that she was going to break up with me. I was not enough; I could never be enough; I was broken, bent, unloveable… So instead of facing the inevitable agony of losing her, I broke up with the beautiful and brilliant Julia Roberts.”
Tragically, Perry’s death fell on a day that may haunt Julia — her birthday, October 28.
Yasmine Bleeth
(c) WENN
Remember on Friends when Chandler drools over Baywatch babe Yasmine Bleeth? Well, this is how big a cultural impact Friends had immediately — he actually dated her IRL in 1996. Guess she was a fan of the show… and liked what she saw!
It was just a brief fling for Matthew — unlike Chandler, who continued to crush on her for years afterward!
Neve Campbell
(c) WENN/Eric Banks
Matthew made a pretty underrated gem of a rom com with Neve Campbell in 1998 called Three To Tango. The chemistry apparently extended beyond the screen, with the pair reportedly having an on-set romance. But it didn’t last — by the time the movie came out in 1999, they had already moved on.
It’s also possible she was his “one that got away”…
In his memoir, Matthew refers to a lost love he “never got over.” He doesn’t name her but says she was an actress he met on the set of a movie in 1999. Unfortunately it didn’t work out when she made it clear his “drinking was a problem” and “picked another guy.” He wrote that the breakup “still hurts” — that was over two decades later.
Fans suspect it was Neve because it was the only movie he made that came out that year. It would have filmed in 1998, but it’s assumed he just got the dates a little off. Then again…
René Ashton
(c) WENN/ Axelle Woussen
For most of 1999, Matthew Perry dated actress René Ashton. They were basically inseparable that whole year!
René seems to be the only other option for that breakup that “still hurts”. He didn’t make a movie with her, but it’s possible he was referring to meeting an actress who wasn’t working on the movie? They were together a long time — and it was while before his next romance…
Maeve Quinlan
(c) Nikki Nelson / WENN
Matthew dated soap star Maeve Quinlan from 2002 to 2003. It’s unknown why he and the Bold and the Beautiful actress split, but they seemed to have an amicable breakup as they were seen together years later getting along.
Heather Graham
(c) WENN/ Marcus Hoffman
In 2003, Matthew was rumored to have a brief fling with Heather Graham. Neither he nor the Austin Powers: The Star Who Shagged Me star ever confirmed this, but they were seen together A LOT for a couple weeks. Then she moved on to Edward Burns, and he moved on to…
Lauren Graham
(c) Nikki Nelson/WENN
Two Grahams in a row? Well, not exactly. This seemed to be a romantic near-miss for both parties.
Matthew and Lauren Graham met in 2003 and were linked in the media. But were they ever really a couple? The apparently flirted up a storm but just couldn’t get things together! In her own memoir, Talking As Fast As I Can, the Gilmore Girl explains Matthew was her “Friend Who I Almost But Never Exactly Dated” or her “FWIABNED.”
They kept a good friendship, though, even if it never quite materialized into something real. They went on to star in multiple TV and film projects together through the years.
Rachel Dunn
(c) WENN
Matthew’s next big relationship was with a young Brit named Rachel Dunn. It was serious enough that, unlike most of his relationships, which he kept very close to the chest, he actually spoke about it publicly! In a 2004 piece in the Evening Standard, he gushed:
“With Rachel in my life, I know that I can be very committed and not some selfish guy who just wants to hang out with friends. I want to spend time with my girlfriend and explore what it means to have a much closer relationship than I’ve previously had time for.”
Perhaps it was the fact she was in his life right at the end of Friends, and he suddenly had enough time to really devote to a personal life? There was even talk of marriage, but it didn’t last. They called it quits in 2005.
Cameron Diaz
(c) Stefan Trautmann / WENN
We wouldn’t so much say Matthew Perry “dated” Cameron Diaz as he went on A DATE with her. And it did not go well!
In Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, Matty revealed he was set up with the Holiday star in 2007, apparently right after her breakup with Justin Timberlake. He got the sense she “wasn’t interested” in the setup at all and that she got “immediately stoned.” Even worse, she hit him!
As he remembers it, he said “something witty” to her during a game of Pictionary, and she went to punch him in the shoulder playfully — and nailed him in the face instead! If you’ve seen the Charlie’sAngels films, you have to imagine that punch HURT! He recalls responding:
“Are you f**king kidding me?”
Like we said, there wasn’t a second date! Hey, sometimes two people might be amazing individually — just not so much together, and they just don’t connect! The next one though…
Lizzy Caplan
(c) Adriana M. Barraza / WENN
This was a big one. THE big one, as it turns out.
Matty was with Lizzy Caplan for about SIX WHOLE YEARS, from around 2007 to 2012! This time Matthew went back to keeping it private — neither gave an interview about it the entire time they were dating OR even after!
But in his book, the Whole Nine Yards star reveals just how close it got. He says he was planning to propose but just never got to it — and she ended up marrying some British guy. (Lizzy married Tom Riley in 2017.) The next time it was that serious, Matthew WOULD propose.
Molly Hurwitz
(c) Matthew Perry/Instagram
The last big relationship Perry would ever get the chance for was with a talent manager named Molly Hurwitz. They dated for a couple years starting in 2018, and the sitcom star DID pop the question. The two were engaged about a year before they ended things in 2021.
Neither said much about the relationship of the breakup, with Perry simply saying:
“Sometimes things just don’t work out and this is one of them. I wish Molly the best.”
However, in her social media tribute to her ex after his passing, Molly wrote about how she admired his “brilliance” and had a “magical” time with him. She also said he was “complicated” and caused her a lot of pain. Ultimately we got the idea this was a tough relationship with a troubled artist.
There seems to be some disagreement though, as some of Perry’s friends have come out since to call Hurwitz a “con artist” and to say Matty hated her in the end! Whoa! Maybe not so amicable…
Sadly, though Matthew was said to still be looking for the one right up until his passing, he never did settle down.
As Lizzy Caplan sees it, times are changing, sexiness-wise.
“I do think it’s a strange time in our society where, on one hand, things feel hyper-sexualized in terms of your appearance, on social media, and flaunting your body in that way,” said Caplan, who stars in the upcoming Paramount+ reboot of iconic 1987 thriller “Fatal Attraction.”
She continued, “Yet it also feels removed from actual sexuality and eroticism and all the things that made these erotic thrillers work back in the day. So there’s a distance between the sexiness of Instagram and actual sexiness.”
The topic of changing attitudes around sex has been a theme in Caplan’s career, as she previously starred in the four-season Showtime period drama “Masters of Sex” as Virginia Johnson, a real-life sex researcher in the 1950s and 60s.
“It’s easy to pat ourselves on the back and say we’ve come so far, but a lot of the struggles are still the same,” Caplan told The Star in 2015. “The truth is, we haven’t come nearly as far as we should. To be a woman who has a healthy sexual appetite is not something that’s easily accepted by much of society,”
