THE MASTER OF DISGUISE

US, 2002, 80 minutes, Colour.
Dana Carvey, Brent Spiner, Jennifer Esposito, Harold Gould, James Brolin, Austin Wolff, Edie Mc Clurg.
Directed by Perry Andelin Blake.

The Master of Disguise is not a film that people will spend a great deal of time discussing. In many ways it is very childish – with touches of the childlike.

It is a star vehicle for Dana Carvey, one of the most successful actors in Saturday Night Live. However, apart from the Wayne’s World films, he did not have a successful screen career like many other of the SNL actors, like Adam Sandler.

The film is a Happy Madison production, the company owned by Adam Sandler. The director, Perry Andelin Blake, was the production designer for all Adam Sandler’s films from 1995 through to 2008. He also did production design for a number of Happy Madison productions.

The story is fairly basic, a kind of tongue-in-cheek fairy tale. A family has inherited powers of disguise – and there are scenes from prehistoric times as well as the middle ages and Elizabethan era. The grandfather tells the story. However, his son (James Brolin) disguised like Bo Derek in 10, narrowly escapes capture by the arch villain, Devlin Bowman, who then spends twenty years in prison. The father has not told his daffy son, Pistachio (Dana Carvey) about his gifts. However, the son is a mimic and takes on the personalities of people around him.

Pistachio is unlucky in love but makes a friend with a little boy and later with his mother (Jennifer Esposito) who becomes his assistant when his parents are kidnapped by Bowman.

This gives the opportunity for Dana Carvey to do all kinds of impersonations and disguises, some funny, some silly. They are like a series of sketches on Saturday Night Live.

Brent Spiner does his best as the arch villain, wanting to rob all the treasures of the world and using the father in his various disguises to achieve these ends. He will then pretend to have killed himself (but with the father in his disguise) and then live to enjoy his ill-gotten gains. However, there are various confrontations and Pistachio wins out.

The film will probably appeal to younger audiences, the farce, the disguises, the pratfalls, the slapstick. There are also the jokes and the silly impersonations. The villain also has a wind-breaking problem which recurs.

Adult audiences will have to be very tolerant as they watch the film – and relish the amusement that they might find scattered throughout the film.