Steve Carell and Steve Buscemi as corny Vegas magicians. Jim Carrey as a wannabe magician. What’s not to like? “The Incredible Burt Wonderstone”, cheesy as it may sound, has a lot of genuine laughs. Too bad it doesn’t have enough to carry it over the finish line, a mere 90 minutes after it begins. Still, it has all the right ingredients for a breezy, entertaining comedy and that’s all that matters if you’re not a very demanding audience. Carell’s Wonderstone is an asshole of a magician who mistreats his partner, Anton (Buscemi). They both perform at a Vegas Hotel owned by James Gandolfini. When Jim Carrey and his new kind of wizard act enter the picture, the duo are forced to come up with something original otherwise they will lose their job. Throughout this terribly uneven movie, it’s the “small stuff”—pieces of throwaway dialogue and interaction between Buscemi and Carell—that caught my fancy and made me laugh out loud. I just wish there were more of them. But overall, “Burt Wonderstone” is relatively painless; it may not be exceptional but it is diverting, which is all one could ask of a mainstream Hollywood comedy these days.

Rating: 2.5/4