I am well aware that comedy
is subjective. What makes one person laugh may have no effect on someone else.
There are some basic human truths that comedy can access and appropriate, and
if the majority of the audience laughs then, regardless of those left alienated,
it can be rest assured that the joke wasn’t made in vain. However, sometimes
things just aren’t that funny. “The Incredible Burt Wonderstone”, despite its
high-concept conceit, despite its comedically gifted cast, just isn’t very
funny.
Steve Carell stars as Burt Wonderstone, a smug, aging
magician who has decided to break his partnership with Anton Marvelton (Steve
Buscemi), whom he has known since childhood, when they learned to use magic as
a way of evading their grade-school bullies. When a masochistic street magician
known as Steve Gray(Jim Carrey) moves onto their Vegas turf, Burt is forced to
either change up his traditional stage act or move on with the rest of the
mystical hasbeens of sin city.
Not only is this movie not funny the entire endeavor is
noticeably tired and lazy. The defining characteristic of Wonderstone as a screen personality
is that he was a once humble and enthusiastic artiste, who has since become
disenfranchised with the world of entertainment, after years of doing the “same-ol’-thing”.
If I hadn’t have known better, I would have thought that this was written in to
be the underlying theses of the entire film, as well as Carell and Buscemi’s
underwhelming and uninspired performances.
Every actor serves
only as a walk-on presence and each scene is so tepidly blocked and flippantly
realized that instead of allowing the performances to break through the plot, most
of the time they just lie there and struggle to muster up barely enough mobility to move
their mouths and deliver their dialogue. Olivia Wilde and Alan Arkin also show up to
pick up a pay check. Arkin does his gruff, old-guy thing, as if he was just
wheeled in between takes of “Argo”, with his attentions more finely tuned
towards the craft-service table. Although
Wilde is valiantly trying to bring some believability to her part, even with
all her bright-eyed sincerity and good intention, her underwritten role is effectively
reduced to nothing but window dressing.
Jim Carrey manages to provoke some laughs with his campy
portrayal as a Chris Angel/David Blaine type performer. However, this joke, in standing
with the rest of this screenplay’s instincts, is long-since exhausted and it
isn’t even the funniest version of it out there (check out David Tenant in the
2011 “Fright Night” remake, or Aziz Ansari and Paul Scheer’s “Illusionators”
skits on Youtube). Even though Carrey is simply falling back on his usual
rubber-faced, over-animated, desperate, screen-grabbing shtick, I give him
credit for trying to generate some life and energy in this otherwise fruitless
affair. But unfortunately he isn’t in the movie enough to save it and for the rest
of the film we are saddled in with (an unusually sedated) Buscemi and Carell,
as they sleepwalk their way to the third act.
Everything that this movie is supposed to be, it isn’t.
It should have been an outrageous character-based comedy, about the
over-the-top nature of professional magic and frippery of Vegas showmanship. It
should have been about how old magic has fallen by the wayside of gimmicky
reality TV magicians and it could have used that idea as a springboard to show
how shocking and extreme the rivalry between the two preening performers could get.
What we are given instead is a passive plot about how Wonderstone has to learn how
to battle his own ego, as he performs card tricks in a retirement home. How
this script was approved before undergoing a few drastic rewrites, I will never
understand.
Originally printed in the Idaho State Journal/March-2013
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