Sometimes a movie has a premise that you can immediately tell is ripe for comedy. The Incredible Burt Wonderstone is one of those movies. Longtime TV director Don Scardino’s new comedy casts Steve Carrel and Steve Buscemi as a magician team called “The Incredible Burt Wonderstone and Anton Marvelton.” When the story kicks off, they’re coasting off the last vestiges of their fame while working on the Vegas strip. You see, they were popular back in the early 80s, when velvet costumes and rhinestones were the name of the game, but these days audiences are more interested in the in-your-face stunts of street magician Steve Gray (Jim Carrey doing a Chris Angel with fashion by Nickleback riff) than they are in old-fashioned illusion work, so ticket sales have started to dwindle. The years of success having given Wonderstone a big head and he and Marvelton not having spoken outside of their well-rehearsed stage patter for years doesn’t help either. It’s not long before the team has a very public falling out, lose their jobs, and find themselves back down at the bottom of the ladder.
See? Sounds funny. Getting to see Carrel and Buscemi wearing velvet jumpsuits and sporting 80s hair should be worth the price of admission alone. However, while that visual is pretty sweet, it’s unfortunately not quite worth the price of admission, and Burt Wonderstone doesn’t manage to do much else to earn its chunk of your precious movie budget either.
Pretty much all of the problems with the film stem, in one way or another, from issues with the writing. Steve Carrel has been pretty hit or miss as far as his performances in feature films have gone, but here he’s not the problem at all. Actually, he’s pretty funny as the arrogant Wonderstone, and even provides the film’s high point thanks to a scene where he breaks down and can’t stop crying for a ridiculously uncomfortable stretch of time. The problem with the film is that his character arc is so poorly constructed that the opportunities he gets to break through the bad writing and provide some laughter are few and far between. The opening of the film, that introduces us to him as a bullied kid who finds escape in magic and his friendship with the future Marvelton, is a pretty black and white interpretation of childhood as an outcast, but thank goodness it exists and is able to give us something about him to empathize with, because once we jump forward to his adulthood he’s a cartoon monster who treats everyone around him too poorly to be believed—and he stays that way for quite a while before he starts to soften again.
The problem with Carrel’s character is one of tone. In a comedy like this you can either toss all morality and humanity aside and go for broke with raunchy, nihilist humor, or you can present your characters as real people and try to find a nice balance between both the humor and the drama of their situations. Burt Wonderstone tries to do everything at once, and it spins out of control as a result. It tries to give Wonderstone a character arc and some ups and downs, but in the beginning he’s too kind-hearted a kid to become the monster he grows into, and once he becomes such an arrogant jerk he’s way too far gone to ever be redeemed. One second we’re supposed to be laughing at what a thoughtless villain he is, and in the next we’re supposed to be invested in some sort of trial he’s facing. It doesn’t work. The decision to try to milk human drama out of joke machines is tone deaf, and given the problems in the writing here, and the similar ones in their Horrible Bosses script, I’m beginning to think that the screenwriting duo of Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daily isn’t one that I’m a fan of.
Going in a more clear direction toward either broad humor or human drama would have helped out the plotting of this one as well. For a stupid comedy about a ridiculous magician who wears outlandish costumes and behaves in unbelievable ways, there sure are a lot of subplots that Burt Wonderstone asks us to keep track of. We’re asked to care about the dissolution of a friendship, a down point in a career, the possibilities of new romantic love, the burgeoning of a mentor/student relationship, a rivalry with a generically evil villain, a big competition where everyone’s future is at stake—and everything gets crammed into a hundred minute movie that probably would have been better off focusing on thinking up better gags. There are only chuckles here, no belly laughs, and they largely come from the charm of the actors and not really anything they’re written to do.
Which brings up the only real positive of this film: it’s got a really good cast. Steve Buscemi is always a welcome presence in any movie, and his turn as Anton Marvelton here is no exception. If there’s any reason to actually care about whether or not Wonderstone and Marvelton’s friendship is able to be repaired, it’s the overly earnest, wounded puppy dog thing that Buscemi is so good at projecting. There are a couple of other side performances here that are able to spruce the film up a bit as well. Jay Mohr shows up as another of the old school, nerdy magicians, and he shows some uncharacteristic humility by having a ridiculous hairdo and believably pulling off being something of a goof. Alan Alda shows up as the elder magician that becomes a mentor to Wonderstone, and while he doesn’t get an incredible amount of things to do, he’s still Alan Alda. He’s one of those actors who’s entertaining just to have around.
The performer who’s really given a chance to shine though is Jim Carrey. We haven’t gotten the chance to see him dress up crazy and cut loose like this in a while, and it comes as a welcome change of pace from the dour dramatic roles and squeaky clean family stuff that’s shown up on his filmography recently. His Steve Gray character dresses like a complete idiot, he’s got stringy gross hair, and he engages in shocking, self-mutilating stunts, and Carrey’s complete conviction and dedication to taking all of the ridiculousness seriously makes what could have been an embarrassing failure of a character actually work. There aren’t many actors who can successfully go wacky, but Carrey at his best is one of them. Maybe with this and his insane-looking performance in the upcoming Kick-Ass 2, we’re starting to see a Jim Carrey who’s going back to what brought him to the dance. That would be a welcome development.
The bit of casting that doesn’t quite work here is Olivia Wilde as the romantic lead. It’s not that she’s bad. Quite the contrary, she’s actually likable and funny in the role, but she’s just not the performer who can pull off being the nerdy girl who’s been obsessed with magic and magicians her whole life. At all. Wilde is a top tier beauty, even for Hollywood, so pairing her off romantically with Carrel would have been a hard enough sell already, but pairing her off romantically with a Carrel character who treats her like garbage for forty minutes of the film is just too much to ask. And what’s the deal with the scenes where she’s following Carrel around unnoticed, keeping tabs on everything he does? Creepy. It felt like they were building to a twist that she was a ghost or something. A homelier actress doing all of this stuff would have been more believable and funnier.
Not believable and not funny: that seems to be the theme of this review so far, so probably it’s time to start wrapping things up. Never is The Incredible Burt Wonderstone less believable or less funny than it is during its climax, when it gives us Wonderstone’s big new trick that’s his last-ditch attempt at saving his career. The illusion that he pulls off is so dumb, so impossible, and relies on such a deus ex machina conceit, that it’s impossible to have any reaction to it other than rolling your eyes and giving up. It seems that the effect they were going for was to produce something so unbelievable that it became raucous and hilarious, but once again, the whole thing fails due to being tone deaf. In movies, like in most forms of entertainment, if you end strong you can convince an audience to forgive a lot. By putting its worst stuff at the very end, an already weak Burt Wonderstone manages to leave you with an even worse impression of it than you might have had otherwise. I never intend on sitting through this one again.
