Starring: Dana Carvey, Jennifer Esposito, James Brolin
Director: Perry Andelin Blake
Rated: PG
IN The Master of Disguise, Pistachio Disguisey (Dana Carvey) is the latest in a long line of Italian crime fighters who beat the enemy by their powers of disguise.
It isn’t just wigs and glasses the family can do, through magic it’s a complete transformation into another persona.
When Devlin Bowman (Brent Spiner) plans to infect the world’s water supply so that everyone is forced to buy his bottled water, Pistachio and his girlfriend Jennifer Baker (Jennifer Esposito) have to infiltrate the evil empire and foil the plot.
There are two things going for The Master of Disguise. It shamelessly quotes other films throughout. It’s fun to see Skrek, Jaws, The Exorcist, Cape Fear, Star Wars, Footloose and several spaghetti westerns, just to name a few, referred to in the course of the story. Secondly it only last 80 minutes.
The problems are many, including American and Italian accents that seem to come and go, plot lines that are incoherent and an attempt at pastiche that is way wide of the mark. The biggest problem, however, is that The Master of Disguise is not all that funny. It seems the last laugh is on the film itself because its least effective disguise is as ‘a hilarious new comedy’. Maybe, at a push, the children will like it.
Given the enormous popularity of cooking shows on television, their influence had to soon have an impact in the cinema as well.
