The Master of Disguise

Directed by Perry Andelin Blake, The Master of Disguise follows Dana Carvey’s Pistachio Disguisey as he sets out to stop a criminal mastermind (Brent Spiner’s Devlin Bowman) from stealing a series of rare artifacts. It’s clear right from the get-go that The Master of Disguise has been designed to appeal solely to small children, as filmmaker Blake, armed with Carvey and Harris Goldberg’s screenplay, delivers a perpetually, pervasively juvenile comedy that contains little in the way of genuinely funny elements – with this vibe certainly perpetuated by a continuing emphasis on jokes and gags of a hopelessly (and aggressively) bottom-of-the-barrel nature. (There is, for example, an eye-rollingly lame recurring bit wherein Devlin farts after a bout of evil laughter.) The picture’s often shockingly tedious atmosphere is compounded by Carvey’s larger-than-life and distressingly grating turn as the obnoxious central character, as the actor offers up a frenetic performance that essentially (and effectively) exacerbates the film’s nails-on-a-chalkboard atmosphere – which, when coupled with an interminable climax (and an endless series of final credits), cements The Master of Disguise’s place as a bottom-of-the-barrel comedy that fares even worse than its noxious reputation might’ve indicated.

* out of ****