By Mike Wilmington Wilmington@moviecitynews.com
Wilmington on Movies: The Incredible Burt Wonderstone
THE INCREDIBLE BURT WONDERSTONE (Two Stars)
U. S.: Don Scardino, 2013
They may call Steve Carell ” The Incredible Burt Wonderstone,” the title character in his new movie, but he‘s really part of a team, like Dean Martin or Jerry Lewis. Carell and Steve Buscemi play a pair of fancy pants superstar Las Vegas magicians in this mostly misfiring comedy—roles that should have been slices of cake for both of them, but wind up looking and playing like Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis leftovers.
Garbed in Liberace-style glad rags and weirdo cascading hairdos, Carell and Buscemi prance and kvetch and diss each other, but obviously, unfunnily. Carell’s Burt is the egomaniac/jerk of the two; Buscemi’s Anton Marveltone is the nice guy who vanishes last. In the movie — crudely directed and callously written, these two fine actors and ace comedians are impersonating a kind of Siegfried and Roy team without the wild animals — and Siegfried and Roy (whose highly lucrative act was cut short by a tiger accident), were probably funnier. The movie tries, even goes a little Freudian. Partners since suburban school days, when they were the geeks who got picked on, the ex-buddies are now two post-David Copperfield professional illusionists who boast of their “Magical Friendship,“ and use it as an ad slogan — but, really, after decades together, hate each other‘s guts more often than not.
Las Vegas show biz is a big fat juicy target and the costars do their best with the material — and so does Jim Carrey as another magician, a guerilla and indie TV street illusionist amd self-professed “brain rapist” named Steve Gray (modeled, it’s said, on some guy named David Blaine). But much as these players (Carell, Buscemi and Carrey) have made me laugh in the past, it wasn’t too long before I wanted them to make the movie disappear.
The Incredible Burt Wonderstone is as much of a dud as its own title , which suggests a bad imitation radio serial (and maybe was intended to). “Incredible” isn’t the word — and even though the overheated adjective is meant to suggest Wonderstone’s overheated ego, it’s too much of a bad thing. Which is exactly what the movie is — with its nasty portrayal of the Incredible Burt at first acting like an incredible asshole, followed by his unconvincing comeuppance and reformation, and its deliberately sadistic gags about sweatboxes, violence, self-mutilation and cute-little-puppy-abuse.
The school kid prologue starts out with Burt being picked on by a clique of bullies, led by Diary of a Wimpy Kid costar Zachary Gordon. Naturally Burt and Anton, the two misfits, bond, and their destiny is locked when Burt receives as birthday gifts from his absent mom: a box of cake mix, and a larger box containing Rance Holloway’s Magic Kit. The kit is a spell-it-yourself prestidigitation package, with video, fronted by Burt’s idol, Rance (played, in by far the show’s best performance, by Alan Arkin).
Soon the two buddies are two little Houdinis, or Houdini and Jerry. In ten years or so, they’re successful blonde, long-haired pro illusionists in Vegas, and in a few more years, they have their own showcase, sponsored by Vegas godfather Doug Munny (James Gandolfini, with a toupee). It‘s called the Burt and Anton Theatre, and it should be a huge career triumph, but that’s where their magical friendship begins to fray. A new popular crazy young rival appears: Jim Carrey as Steve Gray, another blondie whose tricks are unwholesome and whose style is heavy metal, seasoned with masochism. So the two magical chums split up, and their brilliant and beautiful young assistant Jane (Olivia Wilde) has0 enough of self-styled stud Burt (who boasts of having the biggest bed in Las Vegas) and finally leaves, and the theatre flops and Incredible Burt, who’s been an incredible asshole, is eventually reduced to doing magic acts at the local retirement home, where he runs into…. (I give you three guesses, No, make that one guess.)
The Incredible Burt Wonderstone — which would have been better titled :Burt and Anton — has a good premise. But it’s sloppy, unimaginative execution, and its unpleasant, queasy-making jokes sometimes make you feel bad, like being trapped in a hat stuffed with rabbits, who are all squealing and suffocating, or maybe demanding their money back. It’s an ugly show with ugly jokes, a sadistic comedy that tries to juggle surprisingly mean-spirited and unsurprisingly raunchy humor with sentimental slop. They are some laughs of course. With Carell, Buscemi, Carrey and Arkin all working together, it would be confounding if there weren’t. But sometimes you feel bad about laughing at those jokes — like Steve Gray’s crushed puppy gag or the one where he drills a hole in his head. (Scenes like these make the Three Stooges look like crushed puppies.)
You have to have style, real wicked style, to bring off jokes like that, and the funny (or unfunny) thing about Incredible Burt is that the actors have the style, but the movie doesn’t. The director (Don Scardino of TV’s very amusing “30 Rock”) and the writers (Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Dale of the not so amusing but popular Horrible Bosses), seemed to me to be deeply disconnected from the great hot or cool center of what‘s funny, though they certainly tried hard. (If Jim Carrey can‘t bring you home, you‘re in trouble.) Also, the photography is too smudgy, the lighting murky, the sets blah. The movie which should look garish and overblown at the beginning, and a little seedy and dusty afterward (after Burt’s fall), instead looks pretty seedy all the way though.
The trouble with getting hot, as an actor, is that you may get overused — and that‘s the sense you get in a lot of Steve Carell‘s performance, which almost looks like he did it on a dare, or as if he got too wound up in super-schmuckiness instead of the simple schmuckiness he did so well in “The Officer.’ Buscemi plays in his humbler, less assertive mode, and stays out of trouble. But Carrey, given some of the most nauseating and painful-looking gags imaginable — as if The Farrelly Brothers had been hired for a Saw movie — faces them head on, earning plaudits for raw guts, if nothing else. (I was beginning to be afraid that, if the movie lasted much longer, Carrey was actually going to start decapitating himself , or eating his own foot. Olivia Wilde plays a pretty cliché. Gandolfini does his evil grin. And we already gave Arkin his kudo. Thank God he didn’t have to drill a hole in his head to get it.
