Master of Disguise film review

certificate_PG

MASTER OF DISGUISE

Ever wondered what happened to Dana Carvey, the Garth to Mike Myers' Wayne? Thought not. Judging from his new effort The Master of Disguise, it becomes pretty clear who was the Eric Morecambe of that double act. A strong contender for worst film of the year, if not the decade, this woeful effort is so bad that even hardened critics were left reeling after its eighty minutes were up and wishing that its distributors had decided against any preview screenings as an act of benevolence.

Carvey plays Pistachio Disguisey (note the clever name), a descendant of the infamous Disguisey family who for centuries have been celebrated practitioners of, yes, you've guessed it, pretending to be someone else. Except now the family has gone into the restaurant business. Pistachio comes replete with a highly annoying accent and a slightly shuffly gait which one can imagine was meant to be funny. When his father Fabrizzio (Brolin) is kidnapped by master criminal Devlin Bowman in order to exploit his incredible skills, Pistachio has to learn the ropes of disguise in order to save him from a certain death.

Along the way he finds an assistant in the form of Jennifer Esposito, who really needs a new agent, after this and the equally lamentable Welcome to Collinwood. He also, inevitably enough, impersonates people: some quite well simply because they actually got the original real person to play themselves, and others, such as an excruciating attempt to do George W. Bush, which could only surely convince the very short-sighted.

The film is also unsure whether it is a comedy for kids or adults. Seeing Carvey in an embarrassing sequence dressed as a turtle who gatecrashes a party, you are led to believe that even a five-year-old would find this kind of thing unsophisticated. The so-called jokes are way off-kilter: does anyone really think a spoof of Chariots of Fire is going to play well twenty years on?

The only small mercy is the incredibly short running time, with a good eight minutes of credits tacked on at the end. One can only assume that Carvey must have had some kind of commitment to make a studio film that had to be honored and this was the shoddy result. He's neither a master of disguise nor a master of comedy and this dire excuse for a film should be avoided at all costs.