The Master of Disguise
1/2
Cinema
Reviews - Week of January 17, 2003
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate PG. USA.
80 minutes. Directed by Perry Andelin Blake. Written by Dana Carvey, Harris
Goldberg. Starring Dana Carvey, Jennifer Esposito, Harold Gould, James Brolin,
Brent Spiner, Edie McGlurg, Maria Canals, Austin Wolff.
January is notorious in America for being the
month where studios drop crappy releases in which they have no faith. Here,
it's different. In the first few months of the year we get the big end-of-year
pictures that were released across the Atlantic just in time for Oscar
consideration. These are good days to be at the movies.
But here arrives "The Master of
Disguise", giving us a taste of those winter blues that the Yanks
so know and hate. I saw it last night, after finding out that my phone line
had been cut off. Panic and sulking hung over me, as I had no idea that I
could be reconnected as quickly as this morning. I had read the abominable
reviews of the film, and that's what initially sparked my curiosity. But
when the lights went down, I was in the mood for any old comedy -- I smiled
at the colour of the opening credits, and waited for a few cheap laughs to
cheer me up.
The laughs did not come. This is a dreadful movie.
It is cut with all the precision and timing of an irritating kids' TV show,
with kids themselves in charge of the production, and their pets operating
the equipment. Almost every single joke is amateurish in conception, inept
in execution. The music cues use such obvious woodwind and string refrains
that they may well have come from a CD labelled 'Generic Theme Music for
Dummies'. The whole thing is unbearable.
Dana Carvey stars as a goofy waiter whose name
is Pistachio Disguisey. (No, really.) The opening sequence informs us that
the men of Pistachio's family have for years been masters of disguise, but
his father, played by James Brolin, decided to retire in 1978 after getting
in a lot of trouble with gangsters for impersonating Bo Derek. The story
begins when Brolin is kidnapped for his mastery of disguise, and Carvey has
to master disguise to save him. He is tutored by Grandfather Disguisey (Harold
Gould), who basically slaps him around a lot and gives him a bag of tricks.
He is accompanied by an assistant named Jennifer (Jennifer Esposito), whose
sanity and naturalism in the midst of this material make her stand out like
the only unsore thumb.
"The Master of Disguise" is essentially an excuse
for Dana Carvey to go around wearing silly costumes and put on a lot of weird
voices. He does amusing impressions of Al Pacino in "Scarface" and Robert
Shaw in "Jaws", and that's about all there is to entertain us. In other scenes,
he does such things as dress in a big green piece of felt while repeating
the word "turtle" in a Sesame Street voice, or wear an inflatable jacket
that science would say is filled with air but nonetheless turns him into
a giant floating balloon. When the character is not in disguise, Carvey plays
Pistachio as a loser whose eyes never look in the right direction and who
has one of the most irritatingly phoney and whiney Italian accents that I
have ever heard.
This is the kind of movie where a guy will be
tripped up carrying four plates of spaghetti, and then there will be an abrupt
cut to a shot of the spaghetti having landed squarely on the heads of four
restaurant patrons. Where the villain will cackle for an inordinate amount
of time, be interrupted by his own fake-sounding fart and then sit out a
long, embarrassing silence. That gag isn't funny when it first appears, and
repeating it four more times over the course of the running time does not
make it any better.
"The Master of Disguise" is so incompetent that
it can't even pull off its movie references properly. In the scene where
Grandfather Disguisey arrives at Pistachio's house, we hear "Tubular Bells"
on the soundtrack, to remind us of "The Exorcist". There are no thematic
parallels, and the shot doesn't even have the beam of light that made original
image famous. The filmmakers seem to think that just because an old man is
getting out of a taxi, the moment instantly corresponds to Max von
Sydow.
Bad movies have already been made by "Saturday
Night Live" performers, including "Coneheads", "It's Pat" and "A Night at
the Roxbury". Not one of them has been as obviously tacked-together as this.
Carvey is simply desperate here. He is famous for his impression of the elder
George Bush, and he had a cool supporting performance in the Richard Pryor
comedy "Moving" as a guy with many identities. But he has never been a subtle
actor, and seeing his least funny impersonations, for 80 minutes, in a film
that looks like it was assembled by a drunken gremlin, is no fun at all.
Anything but this. Please.
COPYRIGHT©
2003 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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