The Incredible Burt Wonderstone (2/5 Stars)

Uninspired is probably the best word for this movie. It was directed by Don Scardino a name you probably do not recognize. This is his first movie although according to IMDB he has done quite a lot of work directing all sorts of Television series, 30 Rock most notably.  His style is barely noticeable and I won’t mention him anymore in this review. The movie has four writers. They include Jonathan Goldstein, John Francis Daley, Chad Kultgen, Tyler Mitchell. I would not be surprised if there were even more writers than that as the movie has the feel of something put together by committee and by that it is overly broad story within a fill-in-the-blank structure and devoid of uniqueness or creativity. Here, I am going to describe the story very briefly: It is about the redemption of a once successful traditional Vegas magician, Steve Carell, who has fallen on hard times because of his egomania and the appearance of a new type of stuntman magician, a la David Blaine. The magician with the help of his beautiful assistant reconnects with his childhood inspiration and stages a comeback. There is a contest at the end where he out-magics the competition. The End.

Does that sound familiar to you? Well, it should. It is a marketing pitch for a movie you have already seen before, perhaps something starring Will Ferrell and concerning sports. I bet this movie was green-lit for production before it was even written.  The studio got a room of writers together, gave them that paragraph pitch, and ordered a PG-13 script written. The result is a movie that very much feels like it did not need to be made and in a way wasn’t made by anybody in particular. It’s nobody’s movie.

I think the telling clue here is the lack of any decent magic in the movie. None. The best tricks we see are some sleight of hand that barely conceal the fact that Steve Carell and Alan Arkin, his childhood inspiration and now ex-magician, did not even bother to learn sleight of hand in preparation for their roles. There are easy cuts that allow one to recognize it is not their hands much like the way one can tell people in movies hardly ever really play the piano. The movie has a cop out reason for this and that has to do with Burt Wonderstone, Carell, and his partner Anton Marvelton, played by Steve Buscemi, being worn out has been magicians that have not changed their act in ten years. Yeah, but even ten years ago they must have had a decent trick in order to get famous in the first place. You would think we would see something of interest at some point. It never happens.

Now consider the character of Burt Wonderstone himself. His main personality trait is being bored. He takes very little joy in his work, has lost all feelings of brotherhood for his long-time partner, and goes through the routine of seducing groupies as if it is something he feels his status requires even if he does not particularly enjoy it. Truly this is Steve Carell’s least inspired character so far. I would like to draw your attention to one particular failed joke. Burt Wonderstone has been fired from his big Vegas job because his act is terrible and has been informed by his agent that he has no money because he has made nothing but terrible choices. So he is now broke and living in a motel. His assistant, played by Olivia Wilde, comes over to check up on him out of the niceness of her heart. As they are talking, she mentions her own aspirations of becoming a magician in her own right. Burt thinks this notion is silly. Why she asks. “Because,” he states, “you are a woman.” Now true this is misogynistic, but it is also lazy and stupid and those qualities are what I really want to talk about. There is no particular reason for Burt Wonderstone to be misogynistic. I have never heard of a glass ceiling in the world of magic. This isn’t like Will Ferrell’s “Anchorman” where the story was about a news team boy’s club being invaded by a female news anchor. In this movie, it just seems to be there because this movie’s story structure is based off other casually misogynistic movies and so a casually misogynistic main character was just another box on the checklist. Nobody bothered to ask whether the character or plot required Burt Wonderstone to not respect women or put in any sort of effort to make the joke anything more than simply a demeaning comment about women in general. You can, I argue, make fun of a woman. I’m not saying you should not do that, but the joke should have some logical connection to the woman who is the object of ridicule. That brings us to another inexplicable problem.

This is a comedy and like so many other comedies has not hired a comedian for the main female role. The assistant is played by Olivia Wilde, who is not funny. At all. Does not even try. What is she doing in this movie? All she does is look like Olivia Wilde, sit there passively as Burt Wonderstone insults her, and make out with him at the end. Would it kill the makers to cast a comedian who could adlib a couple funny lines where the all male writers were limited in their imagination as to what a woman character could say? It would have been really easy. For instance they hired the very funny Gillian Jacobs from the TV show “Community” for a bit part in this movie. In that bit part she got more laughs than Wilde did in the entire movie. Let’s say 1 to 0. Why on earth couldn’t she be cast as the assistant? I mean she isn’t a supermodel like Olivia Wilde, but she sure isn’t ugly either. Did nobody think about this possibility?

To be fair, there is one thing that transcends the rote nature of this movie and that is the performance of Jim Carrey as the David Blaine-ish magician named Steve Gray. Steve Gray is not really a magician as much as he is a performer of ridiculous acts of self-immolation. In one particular trick he doesn’t go to the bathroom for a straight week. That was pretty funny. Jim Carrey, now 50 years old, and no longer a box office draw (i.e. without studios developing entire movies devoted to his unique brand of comedy) has done the smart thing and started showing up in digital shorts, hosting Saturday Night Live, and taking supporting roles that allow him to still put in superior work. I mean he could be doing the Eddie Murphy thing and keep insisting on being the lead role in inferior movies, each one worse than the one before. This movie isn’t that good but Jim does turn his fifteen minutes of screen time into consistent laughs. I think what we really need is a movie based on or just with the cast of “In Living Color.” That would be something else. 

I Love You, Phillip Morris (4/5 Stars)

A beautiful lie.

Mozart’s K. 492: No.20 Duet: Sull’aria from The Marriage of Figaro holds a special place in prison movies. You may remember it from ‘The Shawshank Redemption.’ It’s the song that Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) subversively played on the prison PA system, which pissed the warden off some and landed him in solitary for a month. Red (Morgan Freeman) commented in his voiceover that he hadn’t the slightest idea what the Italian women were singing about but liked to think it was something too beautiful to express in words. It is a very beautiful song. One of the most sublime pieces of music Mozart ever composed. It also happens to be a lie. In the Opera, the two women are writing a trick letter in which one of them pretends to profess love in order to set a trap that will catch the other’s philandering husband in the act of adultery. The song is played in its entirety at the end of “I Love You, Phillip Morris,” a love story about a compulsive liar and scam artist Steven Russell (played by Jim Carrey) and the man he “falls in love with” during a stint in prison, Phillip Morris (played by Ewan McGregor). I put that in quotes because it is impossible to tell whether Steven Russell means it. He has no code, no honor, and no qualms about looking somebody straight in the eye and lying about the most ridiculous things. But he also does incredibly romantic things. Things that you would think only a person crazy in love or simply crazy would do. So I don’t know, maybe Red had the right idea when he never tried to translate the words to that Aria.

Steven Russell apparently is a real person who right now is in a Texas penitentiary serving a 144-year sentence in solitary confinement. It’s an unprecedented sentence for a nonviolent offender. How one gets such a sentence is a pretty unbelievable story. It’s best to start at the beginning. When Steven was eleven his parents revealed to him that they weren’t his parents. Steven was adopted. (It was a very weird case of adoption. Steven was a middle child. His real parents kept the first and third kid.) Right about that time, Steven also realized he was gay. But he didn’t let anyone know because he lived in Texas. He married a very Christian woman (Leslie Mann), became a police officer, and did such kinda-gay-but-not-if-your-a-Christian things as enthusiastically play the church organ at Sunday Mass. On the side he had numerous illicit and secret affairs with other “not gay” Texan men. Then one day as he was driving home a truck blindsided him, totaling his car and nearly killing him. As the paramedics carted him away, he loudly vowed that he was going to live life the way he wanted from now on. “I’m going to be a faggot!” he declared, “I’m going to really fag it up!” At the hospital he promptly tells his stunned wife that he’s gay and divorces her.

That’s when the stealing starts. Steven Russell moves to Florida in order to realize his dream of being the most stereotypical gay man ever. Flashy cars, clothes, boyfriends. He does it all. Money is no object and none of it is his. He’s stealing from his company, purposely slipping-and-falling in grocery stores, taking nose dives down escalators and suing businesses for his pain and suffering. He gets caught and is arrested. His wife shows up and asks his current boyfriend, “The gay thing and stealing, are they connected?” She is rightly treated to a disdainful response, but I will surmise that they are, at least in the sense that being forced to lie your entire life about something so essential to your identity could probably aid your ability to lie in general or simply be enough to convince a person that God, Family, and Country are bullshit and life should be lived accordingly. Throw in an uncanny ability to survive fatal car wrecks and several suicide attempts, and you can see start to see how a person as brash and reckless as Steven Russell might be possible.

There are some roles that only Jim Carrey can play and this is one of them. Jim Carrey isn’t how you say, a “natural” performer. He’s very much an Act. So is Steven Russell. The nerve of the guy is incredible. He escapes from prison not once but several times. A couple times the first thing he does outside is to buy a suit, go right back to the prison, and impersonate the lawyer of Phillip Morris in an attempt to bust him out of jail as well. (It works at least once.) Other things he does: Lie his way into being hired as the CFO of a corporation and stealing millions, Practicing law without a license, selling bad tomatoes, insurance fraud, credit card fraud, fake tans etc. etc. etc. He also keeps getting caught. Over and over again. At some point the ordinary person would get a hint and cut their losses. But Steven Russell isn’t normal. His Plan B when lying doesn’t work is to commit suicide. He does that several times. Waking up in a hospital not dead becomes a running joke in the movie. This really happened.

And then there’s the love story, which the movie treats as real and sincere, as it might have been although there really is no way to tell. Russell falls in love at first sight when he sees Morris in the prison library. Soon he is sneaking letters and chocolates to Morris (who is diabetic but its the thought that counts) via the prison smuggling system and finally he cons his way into actually getting transferred into Phillip’s cell. There’s a screecher down the hall who likes to yell all night long. Steven pays to have him beat up. Phillip remarks that it is “the most romantic thing anyone has ever done for me.” Happy Days ensue inside and then outside the prison where Russell's subsequent cons are largely perpetrated for the "purpose" of providing Phillip with an extravagant lifestyle. Phillip is largely ignorant of where the money is coming from because Russell lies to him about that too. Most of the humor in the story is situational. The Writer-Directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa are the same writing team behind the BillyBob Thornton movie “Bad Santa” (and, inexplicably, the kid’s movie, “Cats & Dogs.”) Taboo subjects and people behaving badly are not avoided but mined for laughs and cringes. For example it is clearly explained to a new prisoner that to get anything in prison you have to pay for it or you can suck a dick. Nobody in this movie treats this conversation as anything but normal. There is also a scene of loud gay sex, just in case you were wondering. 

If none of the above bothers you, this movie could be quite enjoyable. The story is pretty amazing just in itself. The best parts are the various ways Russell manages to escape from prison. I won’t give away exactly how he does this suffice to say that it takes quite a lot of balls and just as much brilliance. There is a main drawback to this movie though and that is Russell himself. You can’t take the love story seriously because the guy is so unreal. Plenty of the scenes feel strangely empty when it is clear the makers want all those gushy romantic feelings to take over. Or maybe that’s just me being a heterosexual.