One of the characters in The
Incredible Burt Wonderstone calls the charade he's witnessing "rote
and mechanical." That's some magic right there: the movie guessed my
review before I had even left the theater.
I'm developing a theory that comedy actors should only be allowed
to appear in a set number of comedies — three perhaps — before they retire
their shticky characters and move onto other kinds of films, or gardening, or
scrapbooking, or collecting recycled cans from public park trash cans. Certainly
this would have spared us from some of the worst films of Vince Vaughn, Sandra
Bullock, Ben Stiller, Will Farrell, Owen Wilson and, yes, Steve Carell, who
plays Burt Wonderstone, a magician stuck in a hyper-’80s vortex of Vegas
nostalgia.
Carell is the weakest link in this very weak comedy, in which
Wonderstone — horrendously draped in the wallpaper from Siegfried & Roy's
guest bathroom — is dumped from his cushy Las Vegas theater because his
routines are as dated as that bubbling seafood lasagna from that questionable
$4.99 buffet in that dark corner behind the penny slots. I can appreciate Carell's zany humor when it's laser-focused, or just sad and lonely — his Michael Scott from The Office was a mixture of both, which gave him a maddeningly endearing quality that made you want him to fail, but then made you sad that you'd seen that failure when his head hung and eyes drooped. He can be a very sympathetic comedian. Think of that scene of him selling all his action figures in The 40-Year-Old Virgin; I wanted to cry for him.
Carell's performance here, as a David Copperfield-like big-prop
magician, is uneven and increasingly frustrating as he dips in and out of an
old-timey accent and shuffling to and fro out of those velvety, sequined
outfits that only Liberace could love. The film, like many similar comedies —
including anything starring Farrell — casts Carell as a brutish egomaniac and
then spends the rest of the film unmaking him into a more humble, level-headed
leading man. This character "growth," as false and manipulative as it
feels, would work if the true Wonderstone weren't such a glowing jerk. The
guy's a sexist, arrogant pig, who gives his one-night-stands (including Britta
from Community) digitized consolation
photographs, the kind of dopey memento you'd get after riding a roller coaster
at a theme park, but only after they sign his sex release form absolving him of
any morning-after liability. His absolution at the end never seems to wipe away his true purpose, being a dick.
This goes against the tone the film seems to be setting up at the
beginning: Young Burt, bullied and alienated at school, comes home on his
birthday to find an unbaked boxed cake and one of those beginner's kits of
magic tricks. He works at his misdirection, his patter, his sleight-of-hand
and, wouldn't you know it, he's a pretty good magician. Fast forward 30 years
and we find Burt Wonderstone and partner Anton Marvelton (Steve Buscemi) are in
Vegas rolling in the dough. The elevator to Burt's suite is so luxurious his
dates think it's the actual apartment.
The tables turn when masochistic street magician Steve Grey (Jim
Carrey) starts stealing guests from Burt and Anton's shows. Grey's act involves
him digging playing cards from open wounds, hammering nails with his forehead, barbecuing
his skin off his bones and, literally, drilling his frontal lobe. One character
calls it "monkey porn," but it's actually called the even-worse "Brain
Rapist," which inspires this unfortunate line from James Gandolfini,
playing a casino owner: "Folks, get ready to have your brains raped."
Yikes!
Other performers include Alan Arkin, who plays the guy who sold
all those magic kits back when Burt was a boy. Another is Olivia Wilde, Burt's
sexy stage assistant. These are funny people — and charmingly naive of this
film's crudeness — and I was craving to watch them in a better movie. We've
always know Arkin was hilarious, but Wilde continues to impress me. She's not
nearly as funny as her character in another misguided comedy, Butter, but she's a lot of fun here as a
better magician than any of her male counterparts. Poor Buscemi isn't given
enough to do, and when he is it's a disastrous scene in Cambodia as his
Anton Marvelton gives hungry, thirsty children what they always wanted. Food
and clean water? "No, magic kits." Some of these gags, besides not
being funny, feel kinda slimy and cruel.
Honestly, I could forgive all of this if the magic were better.
I'm a sucker for a good magic trick, or just magic in the movies. The Prestige, Christopher Nolan's
obsessive examination at two dueling magicians, is one of my favorite films of
all time. I love watching all the nuts and bolts of a trick, trying to figure
out how a magician misdirects our eyes, and I find that last reveal (yes, the
prestige) to be exhilarating. The magic here is stale and dated, no better than
the magic in that box of gags for children at the beginning of the movie. Ring
tricks, disappearing rubber balls, pulling quarters from ears … this material
wouldn't cut it at a 10-year-old's birthday, so forget Vegas. In the big
finale, Wonderstone ditches magic
altogether and resorts to a thousand or so felony charges by drugging,
kidnapping and assaulting his audience. When the judge slams that gavel down on
the last day of sentencing, I hope he says, "Abracadabra."
Many years ago, I was at a local prison to watch street magician
David Blaine perform magic tricks for some prisoners and their visiting
children. Blaine
was sitting on a picnic bench, children and prisoners in orange jumpsuits
crowding all around him. It was a surreal image. All he had was a deck of
cards, but his magic was inventive and incredible. I was standing right there,
but I couldn't see how he was doing it. It was fascinating. Blaine's recent
endurance feats, and those of shock-artist Criss Angel, are the butt of many
jokes in Wonderstone, but a good
magic trick, one that feels like real magic, is a hard thing to replicate. And
never at any point does The Incredible
Burt Wonderstone get it; not as a movie about magic and definitely not as a
comedy.
You know that trick, where a magician pulls a rabbit out of
his hat? Well, this movie does something even stranger: it takes off its hat
and pulls out a turkey.
Oops.
