Critic Reviews

This is also one dark and wickedly funny comedy.

The 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.

The 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.

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone draws a lot of goodwill from the basic likability of its star performers.

The 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.

Few jokes take us by surprise, but enough comic haymakers land to make “Burt Wonderstone” credible, in not exactly “incredible.”

It’s too cheesy and predictable to be a real miracle, but by Vegas standards, it’s a winner.

Neatly 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.

Carell 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.

As 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.