The Master of Disguise (2002)
Grade: F
Cast: Dana Carvey, Jennifer Esposito, Brett Spiner, James Brolin
Director: Perry Andelin Blake
Rated PG for mild language and some crude humor


“The Master of Disguise” is indescribably bad. It hits new levels of the painfully awful that I thought didn’t exist. I stopped watching it when the credits began, and by that time I had watched 69 minutes of film. The crude jokes about the film’s running time that came to my head after checking my watch are infinitely more entertaining than the film itself.

69 minutes is not very long. And yet “The Master of Disguise” is very long. Its plot never gave it a chance, but its star did: Dana Carvey. Carvey is a brilliant comedic actor, as proven in “Wayne’s World” and on “Saturday Night Live”. Here, in a double attempt at both comeback and appeal to his children, he has possibly screwed up his career forever. I’m still not sure I realize that the man who played Garth Algar could watch the finished product of this film and allow it to be released to theaters. His “Wayne’s World” partner, Mike Meyers, got into legal trouble a few years ago for refusing to film a movie that had a bad script. Carvey is obviously terrified of legal trouble.

Is there anything funny in “Master of Disguise”? Well, I did smile two or three times. I don’t remember what the jokes were though, so ‘very mildly amusing’ is a better description. The funniest thing about “Master of Disguise” is imagining Dana Carvey’s children thinking up fake compliments after sitting through what even they knew was a piece of crap. It’s too bad it didn’t flop on the level Eddie Murphy’s “The Adventures of Pluto Nash” did.

Carvey plays Pistachio Disguisey (a bizarrely unfunny name that makes jokes about Fook Mi and Fook Yu in the new “Austin Powers” film seem to be the most brilliant moments ever heard or seen on film), who doesn’t realize his family has been, up until him, masters of disguises (I suppose this is the plural form of what I suppose I can almost believe is a profession…nah, scratch that last part). Now, he only has 69 minutes to become one and save his father…or is it grandfather? It’s some sort of father, and I think we’re meant to believe he is screwed if he doesn’t learn fast.

There is no plot, really, despite the fact that I just tried to explain one; the plot is a see-through attempt to set up Carvey’s various personas. It’s a star vehicle with the mere purpose of exhibiting its star’s talent, rather than focusing on anything else. Focus is one thing “Master of Disguise” definitely does not have. There are a lot of things “Master of Disguise” has and does not have, and focus stands out when talking about the latter category. It’s all over the place.

Carvey has moments when he threatens to light up the screen, although he never quite does. He gets to use his uncanny Bush voice, but he isn’t given anything funny to do with it. His only almost funny scene is the one in which he plays a stuck-up snob, but that isn’t even funny enough to compare to some of the stuff in, say, Myers’s “Goldmember” (I know, I keep mentioning that, but it really is proof of how far Carvey has fallen). I’m sure he enjoyed playing dress-up at the very least. Any makeup designer who enjoys their work would cream their pants at the sight of “Master of Disguise”. The same cannot be said for a film critic.

When talking about how awful summer films have gotten lately, I’ve heard a lot of mentioning of the recent “Star Wars” prequels. “The Phantom Menace” (which was so-so) and “Attack of the Clones” (which I liked a lot) have almost nothing to do with “Master of Disguise”, but the comparison I am using is not an inappropriate one. The definition of a bad summer film is this one, not the “Star Wars” films which, no matter how bad the dialogue occasionally is, are at least visually stimulating. “Master of Disguise” proves how low films can go, not only in the summer, but in general. The only way they could have even hoped to neutralize the price of admission—even for a matinee—would have been to include a brief and painless mental detoxification on the way out of the theater. If you rented it, you’d be screwed.


-Alex, August 2002