Honestly, there’s a part of me that feels so bad for this Steve Carell-Jim Carrey flop (that opened and died at the box office this weekend) that I’m tempted to take it easy on it. After all, it has some decent laughs, a pair of good supporting performances, and is clearly made with more heart and skill than most films———oh, who am I kidding? Nobody much likes this movie, and few people have seen it/will see it.
What Works: A comedy about a pair of rival magicians (Carell as one half of an old Siegfried and Roy-type duo, Carrey as a more “extreme” Chris Angel-esque performer who practices “magic” like refusing to pee for 12 days or sleeping on a bed of hot coals) is a good set-up for a studio comedy. And Carrey honestly does nail his limited screen-time (the trailers feature him more than the movie does…to the movie’s detriment), but it’s really Carell’s movie, and, unfortunately, Burt Wonderstone…
What Doesn’t Work:…Isn’t much of a character. He’s supposed to be a diva, a patented Will Ferrell-type man-child/jerk who slowly grows less toxic, but the problem is that Carell is too fussy and controlled in his delivery. The supposedly wild, womanizing Burt should feel more spontaneous than he does in any given moment, and the overly-tame, buttoned-down Carell (who’s made a career out of playing variations on a soulful Rick Santorum) may have been the exact wrong actor to play him. And Will Ferrell comedies are great at turning even wilder and meaner as they go along (unlike the fake-sentimental Sandler films, which usually peter out after the first act), but Burt spends its last half going sappy, with Carell spending a bit too much time with a cranky old magician played by Alan Arkin playing Alan Arkin, as he now always does.
What I Would Have Done Differently: It’s great that Burt has such a reverence for magic shows, but a comedy like this would have excelled a lot more if it didn’t. It needed to be a nastier satire of the illusion industry, and it just never even tries to be.