I'll get this out of the way because it bothers me greatly. The movie starts with a warning that there will be flashing lights and such for those people who are bothered by them. I'd be pissed if I were one of those people, bought my ticket, and then found out about this. They used to post signs in the lobby about it and I feel it should be noted in the online/app ordering as well.
This is what you can expect from one of the series - rather implausible situations where everything is pre-planned and goes perfectly. Of course, if you expect anything else you're watching the wrong movie series. This just takes it into slightly more absurd territory.
They're obviously ready to continue the franchise, weaning us off the existing characters, with a few new magicians. Younger ones, of course. They're big into the use of technology along with traditional magic so that gives more options for situations.
They're still The Horsemen. They still go after bad guys and drain their bank accounts. Nothing new there. They get an assignment, they do it. This time it's a thinly veiled DeBeers-like diamond mining family. The heiress is an icy blonde who, shocker, hates magic. Nope. I couldn't make that one up. The goal is for them to steal the signature diamond that just happens to be taken out of decades long storage in a secret Arabian buried vault for some event.
The secret Arabian buried vault. Seriously. It's set in the middle of the desert. There's two armed guards at the entrance. There's a high security keypad. There's the mandatory long elevator ride down to the vault. There's more security stuff. Sheesh. This one set piece is so, well, outré that I give it its own "WTF?" for whoever approved it.
Anyway.
They go to some special house out in the English countryside that's full of old magic tricks and history. They find the information they need to do their job. They use the magic stuff to confuse the police who the bad lady arranged to arrest them. Yeah yeah.
They do social engineering to get to the diamond, crash the fancy ball to do the close up magic to get it and such, use the company's F1 car to distract (that's why they're in the desert where the vault is), get caught, get dropped into a deathtrap, get out of the deathtrap, and eventually foil the bad guy. Or girl, in this case.
One of the new kids is revealed to be the half brother of the evil lady who she thought she killed when she killed his mother, who was obviously fooling around with their father. He's the rightful heir. Yeah yeah.
They do the reveals of how they did all the tricks and that's where you have to suspend disbelief. Things like knowing exactly what the secured display for the diamond looks like so they can duplicate it to their needs, faking her out into thinking she's going to the vault, etc. It makes for interesting cinema and showing how everything has to work perfectly. But it has to work perfectly or none of it works and that's where the movies show their cracks.
Did I enjoy it? Yes. It's pretty much what I expected. Did I find it required me to force myself not to get angry at the incredible sequences of events that had to happen? Also yes. The acting was fine. The new characters to continue the franchise are fine.
I'm not unhappy that I saw the movie. I'll go see the next one, because I know there will be a next one. I will not be doing a movie marathon of these three because I've seen the tricks and how they work. That makes rewatching them rather pointless.
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