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75
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Chicago Sun-Times
This is also one dark and wickedly funny comedy.
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75
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San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
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.
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67
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Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
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.
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50
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The Hollywood Reporter
Enjoyable but as familiar as the old-school routines its magician heroes dish out.
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50
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USA Today Claudia Puig
What might have been an entertaining, silly comedy opts for pseudo-earnestness over movie magic.
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50
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Boston Globe Ty Burr
The hair is funny, in part, because not much else is. “Burt Wonderstone” is a lazy, underwritten imitation Will Ferrell movie.
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45
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NPR Mark Jenkins
There 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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40
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New York Daily News Elizabeth Weitzman
Like 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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38
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Rolling Stone Peter Travers
Magicians 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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10
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Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
Alan 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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