‘The Incredible Burt Wonderstone’

Maybe the title sets the bar too high, but “The Incredible Burt Wonderstone” is packed with talent and short on magic, creating an illusion of entertainment without actually delivering. The story centers on a latchkey kid (played as a lonely middleschooler by Oklahoma City’s Mason Cook) who is given a magic set for his birthday and grows up to become egocentric Las Vegas magic superstar Burt Wonderstone (Steve Carell), who takes lifelong friend and magic partner Anton (Steve Buscemi) for granted and verbally abuses his assistant Jane (Olivia Wilde).

All the beats and plot points drag themselves into “Wonderstone” about five minutes after the audience sees them coming, and while some of the blame for this predictability falls to screenwriters John Francis Daley and Jonathan M. Goldstein (“Horrible Bosses”), director Don Scardino’s pacing bears most of the blame for not keeping the plates spinning. Jim Carrey’s self-abusing freak-magic artist Steve Gray, a ponderous riff on Criss Angel, offers little respite from the film’s soporific rise-fall-rise arc. For a more amusing version of the same character, 2011’s “Fright Night” offers David Tennant of “Doctor Who” putting everything into it.

While “Burt Wonderstone” does present the late James Gandolfini in one of his final film roles, his performance as casino owner Doug Munny barely stands out.

The Blu-ray offers a segment from David Copperfield on the creation of one of the central magic sequences, but beyond that, “The Incredible Burt Wonderstone” has no tricks up its sleeve.

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