IMDb plot summary: A veteran Vegas magician tries to revive his career after his longtime partner quits, he gets fired from his casino act, and an edgy new "street magician" steals his thunder.
Directed by Don Scardino. Starring Steve Carell, Steve Buscemi, and Olivia Wilde.
The incredible Burt Wonderstone is a comedy starring Steve Carell and Steve Buscemi as a pair of Las Vegas magicians, but when Carell’s ego gets a little too big, he breaks up the pair and has to try to make it on his own. This is an extremely strange movie, in that it occasionally seems to forget it's a comedy and plays the dramatic moments of Carell learning to humble himself very straight. There's nothing wrong with dramedies, except that the rest of the movie is extremely broad in its humor and the two moods don't mesh well at all. The comedic moments that work the best are the ones focusing on Jim Carrey as a new stage magician who isn't actually doing magic so much as just doing horribly unsafe self harm actions that nobody else wants to and bragging about how he can handle it. It captures something about the strange prank culture that kind of took over YouTube, and while some of it goes so far as to be unpleasant rather than funny, that works at its core. And the dramatic moments also work at their core. Carell is a talented dramatic actor, so while most of his humor doesn't land here, the scenes where he genuinely tries to learn from his aging magician hero (Alan Arkin) are as good as anything as you would see in a TV biopic... which is to say not great, but certainly serviceable. This feels like an attempt at two different movies smashed together in one, and while either one could have worked on their own, the two together make for a weird unsettling mix.
How it entered my Flickchart:
The Incredible Burt Wonderstone < The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
The Incredible Burt Wonderstone > War and Peace (1956)
The Incredible Burt Wonderstone > Call Me By Your Name
The Incredible Burt Wonderstone > Legend
The Incredible Burt Wonderstone < Free Guy
The Incredible Burt Wonderstone > Camp Rock 2: The Final Jam
The Incredible Burt Wonderstone > The Baby-Sitters Club
The Incredible Burt Wonderstone > The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
The Incredible Burt Wonderstone < Muppet Treasure Island
The Incredible Burt Wonderstone > New Faces
The Incredible Burt Wonderstone > National Theatre Live: The Habit of Art
Final spot: #2056 out of 3853, or 47%.
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