The Incredible Burt Wonderstone

Burt Wonderstone (Steve Carell) is a glitzy Vegas magician whose career runs aground on a double whammy—he has a sudden and disastrous break-up with his longtime stage partner, Anton Marvelton (Steve Buscemi), and the X-treme gonzo newcomer Steve Gray (Jim Carrey at his most demonic) is stealing all of his thunder in face-to-face confrontations. The screenplay eventually gets around to making Burt’s story into a rise-and-fall tale with some semblance of recovery and redemption. But the resolution of these plot points is half-hearted at best. It has movie-scale production values and a story arc of sorts all right, but most of that superstructure turns out to be little more than a convenient place to hang a string of somewhat disparate comedy sketches, not all of which are particularly well-conceived. Cinemark 14. Rated PG-13.