If you regard the pairing of Steve Carell and Jim Carrey as adversarial magicians as a prospect for laughs, you wouldn’t be unreasonable. In the Incredible Burt Wonderstone, the results are, well, tricky at best.
Carell plays Wonderstone, a calcified headliner at Vegas casino. He performs the same old routines with the same old partner, childhood buddy Anton Marvelton (an out-of-place Steve Buscemi). Carrey does his magic on the street. That his tricks often involve a virtually illusion-free, self-inflicted wounding of himself only serves to increase his fanbase. Carell, self-absorbed and with an ego most viewers will wish could pull a disappearing act, fights with Buscemi. The two break up their decades-long partnership, and casino audiences continue to thin.
James Gandolfini as the casino boss, eventually has enough and pulls the plug on Wonderstone, who’s so broke he needs to live in a shabby motel and do gigs at retirement homes. Two “jokes” will give you an idea of the humor in this slight sleight-of-hand film:
When Carell has dinner at former aid Olivia Wilde’s place on his first night away from casino life, he promptly collects the dinner dishes and sets them outside her apartment door for ostensible room service pickup….Gandolfini, who has been on an incredible roll lately (Not Fade Away, Killing Them Softly, Zero Dark Thirty) has not one, not two, but three occasions to ham it up as he less than hilariously forgets the age of his son. On the third occasion, Burt is doing a magic show for Gandolfini’s kid’s birthday party and promptly gets usurped by Carrey, who decides to steal the show.
Carrey also steals the film. His hyper magic emerges dark and edgy, a refreshing counterpunch to Wonderstone’s white bread and vanilla approach. The Incredible Burt Wonderstone even enlists the venerable Alan Arkin as a legendary magician Rance Hollloway, who Wonderstone encounters in, of course, the nursing home. (Holloway, in the film’s opening flashback, inspires a school-age Burt, with a how-to-perform-magic VHS tape). While Arkin doesn’t disappoint, there’s a larger problem. The film’s riches-to-rags/will-Burt-get-the-girl?/will-Carell-and-Buscemi reunite? senimentalities slow down even a vibrant Carrey and Arkin. The film’s pace begins to resemble a car with a bad transmission, sputtering in fits and starts in between some decent jokes. Just when Carrey pulls his final, entertaining stunt, we’re robbed by a script move that neuters his rivalry with Wonderstone. Then as if to be reminded further that 90 percent of the okay magic in this film was computer-generated, the film gives us a massive trick ending that is about as plausible as Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. Director Don Scardino has helmed a scant three films since the notoriously thin Cruising in 1980. Something tells me that isn’t about smoke and mirrors.
