A Year of Garbage Movies #49, “The Master of Disguise” (2002)

I saw most of this movie when I was 13 years old. Pizza Hut was running a promotion where a large pizza came with your choice of 1 of 4 DVDs in an envelope. I was at a friend’s house. I suggested we go with “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure”. He told them “The Master of Disguise”. I haven’t spoken to him since.

It may be surprising that a movie this un-funny could come from a comedy legend such as Dana Carvey. With 16 years having passed since the last time I tried to watch this, I thought surely it can’t have been that bad. However, during the title credits I saw the dreaded “Happy Madison Production” logo and suddenly it all made sense.

I guess Sandler and Carvey wanted to recapture a little bit of their SNL glory days, so they wrote a movie with the flimsiest of premises so that Carvey could do various impersonations…poorly. People who saw him on SNL might recognize Dollar-Store knock-offs of Church Lady and Ross Perot, but none of his iconic characters make an appearance. It’s like they wanted to make a kids movie with subtle humor the adults could enjoy too, but forgot to do the second part. Instead, they padded that time with clips of the bad guy farting after his evil laugh.

Pros:

• Geez, uuuuuuuuuuuummmmmmmmmmmmmmm…. there are some words of encouragement spoken about skateboarding I think? So if you’re trying to learn to skateboard then…uhh…Christ…