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60As ever with comedies like this, all the really funny stuff is in the opening 20 minutes. But it's entertaining stuff, with a scene-stealer from Alan Arkin.
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50For my first trick, allow me to write off an entire picture by merely affixing to the title a one-word contraction: The Incredible Burt Wonderstone isn’t. Please hold your applause.
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38Steve Carell is fatally miscast as an arrogant, flamboyant third-rate magician in The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, which by all rights should have been a second-rate Will Ferrell vehicle.
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50A generic, fitfully funny mainstream comedy that doesn’t nearly get the best from its name-brand players but doesn’t qualify as a desecration, either.
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40The best thing in Burt Wonderstone, besides that final gag, is the second-sickest: Jim Carrey's performance as a David Blaine-esque street magician named Steve Gray.
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50Part manic comedy, part would-be heart-warmer of the "follow your bliss" variety, its odd combination of tones and situations leads to as many awkward, uncertain moments as funny ones.
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75The movie is pleasant. It's reasonably funny. But the one who gets the real laughs here, the hard laughs, is Carrey, who plays the kind of role he should be playing - a complete lunatic.
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50What might have been an entertaining, silly comedy opts for pseudo-earnestness over movie magic.
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50Because Mr. Carell doesn’t go in for the kind of all-out caricature that Mr. Ferrell embraces with a manic glee, The Incredible Burt Wonderstone has an underlying soulfulness that cuts against its farcical aspirations. This is not to say that Mr. Carell isn’t just fine, only that his performance, as impressive as it is, lacks a shark’s bite.
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50Overall the film never finds its footing, with its awkward shifts in tone accentuating the unease. There’s something a little off, and it’s Carell. We want to like him in comedies. It’s a big part of what’s made him a star. The Incredible Burt Wonderstone never really gives us the chance.
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45There are some funny bits and characters around the edges of The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, but its core is empty of humor. In fact, this purported satire of Las Vegas magicians is a three-void circus: the script, the central character and the main performance.
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10Alan Arkin does the best trick, bringing a dollop of humanity to the role of Rance Holloway, the magician who was young Burt's inspiration. Apart from Rance, the whole production is slovenly nonsense, photographed on the cheap with blaring ghastliness. Yet it poses an intriguing mystery. Did the producers appeal to a denominator even lower than common by making their film as dumb as possible, or did it just turn out that way?
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50The hair is funny, in part, because not much else is. “Burt Wonderstone” is a lazy, underwritten imitation Will Ferrell movie.
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38Magicians have been pulling rabbits out of hats for ages. And yet, with all this talent, no one can make a decent script materialize.
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50Jim Carrey kills it every time he shows up in his supporting role as street magician Steve Gray.
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63It’s too cheesy and predictable to be a real miracle, but by Vegas standards, it’s a winner.
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40Like a creaky Vegas act desperate to please, The Incredible Burt Wonderstone is so eager you can’t help wanting to like it. But you also can’t help wondering if something better is playing in the theater next-door.
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50This is a really lively, fun and high-spirited comedy. If you leave after half an hour.
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50The material isn't sufficiently funny to allow me to forgive the film's feeble storyline and two-dimensional inhabitants.
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38The Incredible Burt Wonderstone serves as a reminder that everything in a film has a chance to go wrong before a film begins filming. In other words: It's the script, stupid.
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75This is also one dark and wickedly funny comedy.
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58The Incredible Burt Wonderstone has its cornball charm, thanks largely to the confident work of old pros Carell, Arkin, and Buscemi, but it’s ultimately a big, gaudy, predictable show, strictly for the rubes and tourists.
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67The movie itself is too cautious and unimaginative to bring off what a great magic trick — or comedy — should do: make us laugh out loud with surprise.
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Mar 13, 201338The film is overtly suspicious and critical of the new and only serviceably romantic about the old.
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67The Incredible Burt Wonderstone draws a lot of goodwill from the basic likability of its star performers.
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67The third act of Scardino's movie is very funny, and its finale featuring the exposure of an impossibly successful illusion is flat-out brilliant. It's just too bad that the movie's opening act is so sleight of humor, damaging the movie's potential. Now you see it. Then you don't.
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50The film's biggest surprise is that, after Wonderstone loses everything, we're expected to feel something besides impatience as he learns to become a better person—and gapes like a child at the wonder of magic.
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20No matter; this aggressively humorless farce would play like a dead rabbit pulled out of a hat, regardless of the casting choices.
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63Few jokes take us by surprise, but enough comic haymakers land to make “Burt Wonderstone” credible, in not exactly “incredible.”
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60Carell and Carrey shine like sequinned suits in a comedy that allows them endless fun with the dressing-up box. More narrative verve and it could’ve been The Prestige in a big-cat wig.
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40The inconsistencies in tone - is it an Anchorman-style farce or something more serious? - distract from likeable turns from the leads.
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60Neatly balancing brightly sentimental comedy with slightly edgier funny business, The Incredible Burt Wonderstone pulls off the impressive trick of generating laughs on a consistent basis while spinning a clever scenario about rival magicians waging a Las Vegas turf war with a wide multi-demographic appeal.
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Mar 10, 201350Enjoyable but as familiar as the old-school routines its magician heroes dish out.
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58Like the back half of its namesake, Wonderstone isn’t terribly hip, edgy or new itself, just amusing enough to pass the time. While Scardino and friends do manage to end the film on an admirably nutty note, this gathering of comedic minds ultimately fails to produce any true movie magic.
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0It's a comedy so out of touch that jokes disappear before they're even delivered, as if by magic.