Director – Perry Andelin Blake, Screenplay – Dana Carvey & Harris Goldberg, Producers – Barry Bernardi, Sid Ganis, Todd Garner & Alex Siskin, Photography – Peter Lyons Collister, Music – Marc Ellis, Music Supervisor – Michael Dilbeck, Visual Effects – Asylum (Supervisors – David M.V. Jones & Nathan McGuinness), Special Effects Supervisor – Roy Arbogast, Makeup Effects – Kevin Yagher Productions (Supervisor – Kevin Yagher), Production Design – Alan Au. Production Company – Revolution Studios/Happy Madison/Out of the Blue Entertainment.
Cast
Dana Carvey (Pistachio Disguisey), Brent Spiner (Devlin Bowman), Jennifer Esposito (Jennifer Baker), Harold Gould (Grandfather Disguisey), James Brolin (Frabbrizio Disguisey), Edie McClurg (Mother Disguisey), Austin Wolff (Barney Baker), Mark Devine (Trent), Maria Canals (Sophia), Jay Johnston (Rex)
Plot
Shy, nervous Pistachio Disguisey grows up working as a waiter in his family’s Italian restaurant. His parents have kept him ignorant of the family’s long history through the centuries as Masters of Disguise who adopt various disguises to defend the world from evildoers. Pistachio’s father and mother are now abducted. Pistachio’s grandfather tells Pistachio of his heritage and urges him to now become a Master of Disguise in order to rescue his parents. Pistachio trains in the way of disguise and learns of Energico, the secret force from within that he can tap in order to transform himself. He also auditions for an assistant and selects solo mother Jennifer Baker. He and Jennifer set out and follow the trail of Devlin Bowman, who Pistachio’s father placed in jail twenty years ago and is now forcing Pistachio’s father to use his mastery of disguise to steal the great treasures of the world.
When it comes to The Master of Disguise, it is not hard to see the chain of thinking that went on in the executive boardrooms where the decisions to greenlight films are made. Someone must have looked at the hit successes that Mike Myers had with the Austin Powers films – Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery (1997), Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999) and Austin Powers in Goldmember (2002) – and thought about emulating that. At some point, somebody must have remembered Dana Carvey, Mike Myers’ co-star in Wayne’s World (1992) and Wayne’s World 2 (1993), where Myers first came to fame, and thought “Hey, how about we put Dana Carvey in a spy comedy? We could have him adopt a whole bunch of different roles throughout, just like Mike Myers does.”
However, the effort to do so promptly fell on its face. The Master of Disguise wasn’t exactly a box-office flop and did make its money back but it was critically trashed and is widely regarded as a Bad Movie. The worst to come out of it was Dana Carvey, whose career since Wayne’s World had been on the less-than-inspired side – where efforts like Clean Slate (1994) failed to set the world alight and his own comedy series The Dana Carvey Show (1996) was cancelled after six episodes. Since The Master of Disguise, Carvey has barely appeared in anything outside of animated voice work.
Where the Austin Powers films are enjoyably silly, The Master of Disguise is just silly. Embarrassingly silly at times. There is something painfully forced about Carvey’s attempts to follow in Mike Myers’ footsteps – the opening moments even have him attempting to mimic the donkey in Myers’ hit Shrek (2001). You cannot deny that Dana Carvey has a talent when it comes to mimicry as he demonstrated on numerous episodes of Saturday Night Live (1975- ). Here he takes ample opportunity here to adopt a bunch of disguises of everyone from George W. Bush to Al Pacino from Scarface (1983), Robert Shaw in Jaws (1975) and a cowpad and a cherry pie!!!. The end credits contain a series of outtakes and reveal that there are a number of other disguises that were shot but ended up on the cutting room floor, including Carvey as a vampire, a carnival barker and parodies of Gladiator (2000).
Dana Carvey as Pistachio Disguisey in balloon suit
But The Master of Disguise also ends up tiring. Carvey’s default role as Pistachio with his fake Italian accent and child-like sotto voce falsetto very quickly becomes tedious. Indeed as the lameness of the comedy around him goes on, you can literally see Dana Carvey’s career being flushed away as though someone had poked a pin into the balloon suit he wears. There are some excruciating sequences that go on and on about Carvey in training messing up facial disguises or the antics with the inflated balloon suit.
At times these become mind-staggeringly inane – like Carvey’s attempt to get into an exclusive club as a bespectacled bald man in a turtle suit who keeps saying only “turtle” to everything. The film seems to regard the height of humour being Brent Spiner’s villain laughing maniacally and then farting every time he does – indeed this seems to be regarded as so funny that the film repeats the gag several times over.
The Master of Disguise was co-produced by Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison production company and Sandler listed as an executive producer. Direction was turned over to Perry Andelin Blake, a production designer on most of Sandler’s films since the 1990s. Although with the film’s flop, Blake has failed to return to the director’s chair.
