Steve Carrell and Jim Carey together, with a touch of Steve Buscemi... a perfect combination made in comedy heaven, and throw in a little Alan Arkin, and you get this half-baked film with so much promise and so little to praise.
Here you got people trying really hard to play dumb, absurd, push the buttons, the limits, and what we have is so much frustration because you wonder if this is just bad editing, some poor judgment, or some sloppy writing. I hated the character of Burt and felt pity for Anton, so I knew what the basics of the plot were. What was missing was the lack of character development, the need to have a director who understood timing because very little was funny here.
In "There's Something About Mary" and "The Three Stooges" the physical comedy works, our dislike for some horrible characters still provokes uneasy laughter. In here, we look at what could be a train wreck, but we feel very little. Jim Carrey's scenes are a good example of this syndrome. He goes for shock value and is acting his heart out when he does each one of his progressively dangerous and disgusting magic tricks. Still, we barely wince.
There could be so much more to the character of Burt. He's such a repulsive egotistical snake at first, then he grows likable but the strokes are too broad, not giving him enough time to act the part. I think he is very talented and underused here. The fact that even his costumes were not even that "crazy" or "ridiculous" didn't help.
Another case of could have been, should have been...
Here you got people trying really hard to play dumb, absurd, push the buttons, the limits, and what we have is so much frustration because you wonder if this is just bad editing, some poor judgment, or some sloppy writing. I hated the character of Burt and felt pity for Anton, so I knew what the basics of the plot were. What was missing was the lack of character development, the need to have a director who understood timing because very little was funny here.
In "There's Something About Mary" and "The Three Stooges" the physical comedy works, our dislike for some horrible characters still provokes uneasy laughter. In here, we look at what could be a train wreck, but we feel very little. Jim Carrey's scenes are a good example of this syndrome. He goes for shock value and is acting his heart out when he does each one of his progressively dangerous and disgusting magic tricks. Still, we barely wince.
There could be so much more to the character of Burt. He's such a repulsive egotistical snake at first, then he grows likable but the strokes are too broad, not giving him enough time to act the part. I think he is very talented and underused here. The fact that even his costumes were not even that "crazy" or "ridiculous" didn't help.
Another case of could have been, should have been...