Magical performance

In the most painfully memorable scene in his big-screen breakthrough in The 40 Year Old Virgin, the hilariously hirsute Steve Carell had all of his chest hair removed with such ferocity it’s like watching a scalping in an old John Wayne western.

Amusingly, in his new movie, the funny and oddly touching Las Vegas-set comedy The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, the chest of Carell’s title character is smooth and tanned.

Carell’s polished pecs are just some of the myriad makeup and costume details that make you laugh the minute you lay eyes on Burt Wonderstone, a superstar magician in the David Copperfield mould who each night climbs into an Elvis-style jumpsuit and sleepwalks through an act he and his partner Anton Marvelton (Steve Buscemi) have done a thousands times before.

Burt is now so bored with the routine, which begins with a laughably stiff dance routine to Steve Miller’s Abracadabra, that he uses the show to pluck another attractive fan from the audience, include her in the act, then have sex later.

Carell normally plays likeable little guys so it’s a pleasant surprise to see him as a kind of moronic, preening, narcissistic creep.

So while The Incredible Burt Wonderstone has the edginess you expect of an American comedy in the era of Judd Apatow, especially one featuring Jim Carrey as a tattooed, self-harming street magician who challenges and inspires Burt and Anton, Carell brings a little more heart and believability to the hero’s redemptive journey.

That journey is back to Burt’s roots as a magician. He and his childhood friend Anton started out with card tricks and plucking coins from behind people ears — but now they’ve curdled into the magician’s equivalent of one of those self-aggrandising, big-haired 1980s rock acts.

That trek back in time begins when James Gandolfini’s blustering hotel owner tells them that he wants something new and edgy — something like what is being delivered by Carrey’s Steve Gray, an extreme magician who slices open his face to find a disappeared playing card.

The pair’s attempt to emulate Steve high above Vegas in a perspex box ends disastrously, sending Anton to Africa where he brings magic sets to impoverished children and the broke Burt to do tricks in a retirement home.

The movie belongs to Carrey, who, as Steve Gray, the buffed Criss Angel-inspired performance artist whose warrior-philosopher approach to magic disguises his careerism and desperation for a Vegas gig, reminds us of the inspired comic genius who’s gone missing in recent years.