Producers: Tim White and Trevor White   Director: David Freyne   Screenplay: Pat Cunnane and David Freyne   Cast: Elizabeth Olsen, Miles Teller, Callum Turner, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, John Early and Olga Merediz   Distributor: A24

Grade: C

The afterlife comes across as a rather dismal place in David Freyne’s dramedy, which he co-wrote with Pat Cunnane.  It consists of a huge train terminal (pun intended) where the recently departed arrive at the age in their lives when, supposedly, they were most happy, however old they might have been at their demise.  Each is assigned a coordinator for a week, during which the arrival must choose an ultimate destination where he or she will spend eternity.  The various possibilities are advertised around them, and range widely.  Want to spend every day on a sunny beach?  In a mountain cabin?  At a place that welcomes smokers, or gamblers?  The opportunities are many, and often absurdly niche.  The catch is that once you make your choice, it’s irrevocable: you’re sent on and can’t come back.

This seems to ensure an eternity of endless sameness and boredom, a circumstance that the script never addresses at all.  And, of course, there’s nothing of transcendence about it: it’s just a prolongation of a life one chooses without the admittedly annoying elements of aging and death.  An interesting script might have been written about it.   

But instead, the movie turns into a sappy romantic triangle centering on the Cutlers, Larry and Joan.  We meet them as an elderly couple bickering as they travel to a family “gender reveal” party.  Joan (Betty Buckley) is suffering from terminal cancer, and Larry (Barry Primus) worries about the trip overtaxing her.  But it’s he who dies during the event, choking on a pretzel soon after seeing a photo of his wife with her handsome first husband, who died in the Korean War.

Larry arrives at the busily bureaucratic afterlife station as a young man (Miles Teller), apparently when he was a newlywed.  He decides that he must wait for Joan to join him before proceeding, as he can’t imagine spending eternity without her.  His coordinator Anna (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) allows this, and Larry prepares to stay for a while, comforting himself with an occasional visit to a bar where a guy named Luke (Callum Turner) mixes the drinks.

It’s not long before Joan (Elizabeth Olsen) shows up, having died quietly in bed.  Larry welcomes her enthusiastically, expecting they can quickly move on together to an eternity of their choosing.  But there’s a complication.  Luke turns out to be her first husband, who has waited for decades for her to join him in going to the rustic mountain cabin they’d imagined spending their life in. And as she explains to her coordinator Ryan (John Early) and to livewire Karen (Olga Merediz), a deceased friend who’s enjoying her freedom, choosing between the two men is tearing her apart.  Meanwhile she’s given the chance to spend time with both, while they in turn squabble about which of them she should choose.

This situation is not unlike that found in earlier movies without the “supernatural” trappings—think, for example, of “My Favorite Wife” (1940) and its remake, “Move Over, Darling” (1963), in which a supposedly dead wife returns to find her husband remarried, and he must make the choice between her and his second wife.  What “Eternity” does is to mash together the hoary scenario with Albert Brooks’s “Defending Your Life,” and unhappily it does neither justice, missing both genuine romance and the deadpan wit Brooks brought to the table.

It’s also a terrible cheat.  It spends inordinate time in world-building, explaining the rules that govern terminal procedure and the choice of a final destination.  Yet it treats Joan’s dilemma as unique, even though given the billions of folks who have passed through over the centuries others must have faced similar situations; for Anna and Ryan, however, this is a crisis that requires referring it to some unspecified upstairs for approval of special dispensations.  But even that is secondary to the fact that after telling us the rules governing the choices arrivals make are ironclad, the script tosses all that out the window in the end to allow our protagonists to change things by running around through hallways, climbing ladders and easily evading pursuers.  It turns out that the world the script has so assiduously constructed is a crock.

Which isn’t to say that there aren’t some amusing grace notes to it.  The exposition hall where proponents of the various final destinations hawk their ludicrous wares is a testament to the foolishness of people’s preferences, and the archive where Joan goes to view memories that might help her make her choice is a nifty idea, especially when it’s presided over by an increasingly grumpy ticket-seller.  Generally, though, it’s a curiously bland place in Zazu Myers’ production design, and Ruairí O’Brien’s flat cinematography doesn’t endow it with any magic.  Even David Fleming’s score is ordinary.

Things might be different if the leads had much chemistry, but they don’t.  The best is Teller, who at least brings frazzled energy to Larry; but Olsen’s Joan is, despite her centrality in the triangle, curiously dull in her indecision.  (Truth be told, Primus and Beckley are the more interesting couple.)  And Turner comes across as a good-looking blank.

As for Early and Randolph, they’re stuck in stereotyped parts—he the effete white dweeb, she the rotund, good-natured black woman—that feel prefabricated.  Merediz brings some spunk to her scenes and a few of the lesser characters register briefly, but overall it’s hard to root for anyone here, or to feel their pain and joy.  That’s a factor of pedestrian direction from Freyne and dilatory editing by Joe Sawyer, which dilute any fizz the story might have generated.

The result is a fairly anemic otherworldly rom-com about an afterlife that’s barely worth visiting, let alone spending an eternity in.

Producers: Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci and Bobby Cohen   Director: Ruben Fleischer   Screenplay: Michael Lesslie, Paul Wernick, Rhett Reese and Seth Grahame-Smith   Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Dave Franco, Isla Fisher, Justice Smith, Dominic Sessa, Ariana Greenblatt, Rosamund Pike, Lizzy Caplan, Morgan Freeman and Mark Ruffalo   Distributor: Lionsgate

Grade: C

Watching even a simple magic trick skillfully performed can be quite satisfying, because one can appreciate the craft that’s gone into making it mystifying.  But the “Now You See Me” series, which began in 2013 and spawned a 2016 sequel before taking a nine-year hiatus, has never been more than mildly engaging because it mistakes complexity for cleverness and substitutes special effects for genuine sleight of hand.  Like its predecessors, “Now You See Me: Now You Don’t,” despite the supposedly master prestidigitators on hand, has plenty of action but precious little magic.  What you’re left to appreciate isn’t the skill of the illusionists but the efficiency of the effects team—which, given the state of today’s Hollywood moviemaking, is a commodity that’s hardly in short supply.

Of course, viewers may also enjoy being reunited with the bickering, competitive characters they’re familiar with—the original so-called Four Horseman who put their skills to beneficial use unmasking and punishing villains.  And all four of the original quartet are back—smug, arrogant Danny Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), mentalist Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson), card specialist James Wilder (Dave Franco) and escape artist Henley Reeves (Isla Fisher), Wilder’s former romantic partner.  And as if that weren’t enough, Morgan Freeman returns as Thaddeus Bradley and Mark Ruffalo (ever so briefly) as overseer Dylan Rhodes.

But that’s not all.  We’re treated to three new young magicians who begin as rivals and become allies: master illusionist Bosco (Dominic Sessa), trade historian Charlie (Justice Smith) and accomplished pickpocket June (Ariana Greenblatt).  You might be thinking: how many horsemen are too many?

In any event, it’s the newbies who begin things with an underground performance in which they fleece a crypto crook of his offshore stash using holograms of the Horsemen, who’ve been disbanded for years.  That brings a visit from Atlas, who berates them for their presumption but invites them to join him in a new mission.            

The target is Veronika Vanderberg (Rosamund Pike), the matriarch of a South African diamond company with Nazi roots that’s also the front for an international money-laundering operation.  Atlas, Merritt, Wilder and Reeves, all summoned by tarot cards from the mysterious Eye, reunite to take her down, bringing the youngsters into the act.  The first part of their scheme involves stealing the famous Heart Diamond, the foundation of the Vanderberg legacy, which Veronika is putting on auction in Antwerp for the first time in years.  The theft is, of course, an extremely extravagant business done before a crowd of rich buyers, and includes roles for all the magicians; the ample amounts of deception and misdirection are, in this case, explained afterward, even though the implausibility remains staggering. 

But that’s only the beginning of the plot to bring down the Vanderberg operation. The action proceeds next to a French chateau where both Thaddeus and a squad of police seeking the thieves show up and where our heroes, after the obligatory amount of arguing and one-upmanship, must confront rooms that shift and swerve like exhibits in some fantastical carnival.  And some of them do not escape.

An action-filled interlude in a police station, featuring more fists than tricks (as well as a surprise appearance by another character from the earlier movies), leads to a grand finale in Abu Dhabi, which includes a car chase mimicking those of every recent action blockbuster you can think of, the escape of the original Horsemen from a supposedly inescapable death trap, and a final revelation that amounts to the crowning implausibility of an already astronomically incredible scenario.  Naturally there’s a coda suggesting that further installments may be in the offing.

If one can swallow the multiple inanities inherent in a fast-moving but brainless caper movie driven by supposed magic tricks that are just special-effects contraptions, as well as assurances that split-second timing is always essential constantly undercut by crises that have to be resolved by fighting and last-minute changes of plan, “Now You See Me: Now You Don’t” can serve as a harmless time-waster.  Under the genial if sometimes lax hand of director Ruben Fleischer, who was undoubtedly helped by having previously worked with two of the stars in the “Zombieland” movies, it’s certainly been done up colorfully, with a glitzy if artificial-looking production design by David Scheunemann and flashy cinematography by George Richmond, not to mention the yeoman efforts of the effects teams.  Stacey Schroeder has edited the big scenes spiffily, though some of the talky interludes lag, and Brian Taylor’s score hits the expected notes along the way.

As to the cast, Eisenberg and Sessa take the lead in their respective groups, the former honing his smugly superior attitude to a fine point in delivering his monologues and the latter smoldering with pent-up anger at being looked down upon.  The other good guys fare less well, with Harrelson reduced to depending on his familiar shtick and Franco and Fisher failing to engender many sparks as they rekindle their old love; Freeman adds his usual gravitas but not much else. Greenblatt and Smith fade into the background, though the latter has some big moments toward the close.  And then there’s Pike, who hams it up mercilessly as the villainous Vanderberg.  As one watches her over-the-top turn the thought that keeps coming to mind is: certainly those can’t be her real teeth!  But her outright exaggeration at least makes up somewhat for the lack of fizz in the banter among the Four Horsemen provided by the four screenwriters.

Fans of the series who have been hankering for a new entry will get some modest, if momentary amusement out of “Now You See Me: Now You Don’t.”  Others may feel that the makers of the franchise have copied the technique that Atlas accuses Vanderberg and her colleagues in the jewel trade of having accomplished: of tricking people into believing that there’s any real value in diamonds—or in shiny but empty cinematic baubles like this.