‘The Master Of Disguise’ at 20: Why Didn’t Dana Carvey’s Comedy Stylings Translate To Silver Screen Success?

20 years ago this month, a comedy was released starring a popular Saturday Night Live alum wearing a bunch of different wigs and make-up that would go on to become his highest-grossing live-action film as a solo lead—and also his last. No, I’m not talking about Austin Powers in Goldmember; despite all good sense, subsequent live-action Mike Myers projects The Cat in the Hat and The Love Guru do exist. But Myers’ fellow SNLer Dana Carvey, who played his bestie in the Wayne’s World movies, had a smaller-scale success in summer ’02 with The Master of Disguise, a kid-skewing Carvey vehicle produced by still another SNL guy, Adam Sandler. Master of Disguise horrified critics and audiences all around the country, and is also Dana Carvey’s only hit movie as solo star.

To be sure, it was a modest success, if that word can be applied to a movie that ended the directorial career of production designer Perry Andelin Blake; seemed to convince Carvey to give up movies for good; and visibly labored to reach the 80-minute mark. But, look: It also made $40 million at the domestic box office. That’s more than The Love Guru managed seven years later. In fact, adjusted for inflation, The Master of Disguise made more money than recent hits like Jackass Forever, Dog, Candyman, and House of Gucci.

House of Gucci is a surprisingly apt comparison point; Master of Disguise also features a failson character with a questionable Italian accent, and it’s easy to picture Jared Leto enthusiastically suiting up for the Turtle Club in hopes of snagging another Oscar. Alas, Master of Disguise is an intentional comedy. Carvey plays Pistacho Disguisey, a Sandler-like manchild bumbling through his job at a family restaurant, until he finds out he belongs to a rich lineage of spies who use their superhuman disguise skills to… fight evil, I guess? Master of Disguise uses a kiddie-movie conception of spies, which means they stop mustache-twirling bad guys from stealing stuff. When Pistachio’s parents are kidnapped by one such bad guy, he must learn the family trade to rescue them.

The basic idea makes sense as a vehicle for Carvey, whose tenure on Saturday Night Live was beloved largely for his elfin, mischievous impressions. Whatever political bite derived from his famous imitations of, say, George H.W. Bush or Ross Perot wasn’t based on his instinct for cutting satire. Instead, Carvey would stretch out his subjects’ vocal mannerisms like taffy, honing in on certain key phrases and then distorting them while keeping them sticky. He’d spoof famous figures by turning them into broader cartoons as their time in the public eye went on, the heat of the spotlight melting them into their accidental catchphrases. (He did this with his own characters, too; Hans of Hans and Franz is basically an Arnold Schwarzenegger impression microwaved on high, and by the end of his SNL run, the Church Lady was, somehow, practically an impression of herself.) Even now, well past any work on an actual sketch show, Carvey keeps up with the presidential administrations: He’s done Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden, mostly in stand-up or while riffing on talk shows—though his Bush II makes an appearance in Master of Disguise.

It’s a difficult shtick to translate into feature films. In Carvey’s first major movie, Opportunity Knocks, he also contrives reasons to switch characters and voices, albeit in a lower-tech form, as a con man impersonating a suburban housesitter. Naturally, his cons involve him periodically doing zany voices and highly questionable “funny” accents, often coming across more like the kid hero in a body-switch comedy rather than a low-level criminal. At one point, he breaks out his famous George Bush voice—Carvey playing the hits as shamelessly as Paul McCartney (who he also imitated on SNL, naturally). Carvey’s Clean Slate, an even bigger flop, takes a more chilling approach. Carvey plays a private detective whose memory of his previous day is wiped clean every morning—in other words, a man who (at least temporarily) is armed only with his immediate shtick.

The Master of Disguise is a natural extension of Carvey’s earlier star capers, only more frantic and incoherent. It is also only watchable because of how close it skirts to utter unwatchability. On a basic premise level, the movie is muddled out of the gate: Is Pistachio learning the art of quick-change makeup and wigs or is he physically shape-shifting? That amorphous cartoonishness, augmented with CG, apparently applies to everyone in the movie; Pistachio doesn’t appear to be a borderline superhuman weirdo like Ace Ventura. In Disguise’s most famous scene, Pistachio assumes that in order to infiltrate a fancy venue called the Turtle Club he must dress as a grotesque man-turtle hybrid, and he appears to bite (?) off a man’s nose (?!), then spit it back onto his face to reattach it (?!?).

The movie itself has a similarly lumpen-clay consistency. It gets in and out of its scenes with an alarming disregard for the basic grammar of film; that Turtle Club bit ends with an abrupt cut to Turtle Pistachio cackling and breakdancing (?!) in fast-motion as the movie dissolves into its next bit of business. Blake, the director, seems in well over his head when it comes to basic tasks like editing, which may explain why as much of the movie as possible has been shunted off to the end credits. Master of Disguise barely runs 65 minutes before those credits take over and showcase deleted scenes that include multiple Pistachio disguises not seen in the film. The film’s most enduring mystery is how it sorted through Carvey’s library of mimicry and landed on characters like his absolutely terrible take on Al Pacino. (I reached out to Carvey’s representatives, asking about the possibility of talking to him—hoping that, at very least, I could ask him about the process of sorting through all of Pistachio’s possible characters, and chat about his successful SNL-centric podcast—and I was politely informed that “he doesn’t have much to say” about the movie.)

Yet there is a kind of cinematic tradition upheld in The Master of Disguise, specifically in the ways it resembles a broken funhouse-mirror of a Peter Sellers comedy, somewhere between his multiple-character work and the sillier slapstick of the Pink Panther series. This is especially noticeable when juxtaposed with Austin Powers in Goldmember, the Mike Myers blockbuster that released one week earlier. Myers has more directly professed an affinity for Sellers, though by the time of Goldmember, his lovingly applied latex, prosthetics, and accents were wearing thin, if not exactly Turtle Club thin.

It’s not that Goldmember is vastly better-constructed than The Master of Disguise. In fact, for one of the biggest comedy hits of the past two decades, it’s shockingly slapdash, full of limping detours and the kinds of shrugged-off plot turns that were charmingly ramshackle in Wayne’s World while making less sense in a James Bond spoof. Goldmember escapes Master-level disaster by virtue of some tentpole laughs and coasts on some goodwill—enough that the Myers Man of a Thousand Faces routine made more on its opening weekend than Carvey’s version managed in its whole run.

Master of Disguise seemed to reach a younger audience and likely turned a profit, but maybe the disparity in box office and reviews were enough to convince Carvey to redirect his energy elsewhere. It’s probably for the best; he still draws a crowd as a stand-up, and his Fly on the Wall podcast with David Spade is going strong. Myers, meanwhile, has re-emerged with another batch of his own disguises on the Netflix series The Pentaverate. The show isn’t wildly funny; does it seem especially charming simply because it’s out of fashion? Kind of like Austin Powers in general?

Viewed 20 years later, Master of Disguise and Goldmember are both chasing some kind of bizarre platonic ideal of full comedic embodiment, where other actors are only on set for the minimum practicality. Eddie Murphy tried this too, seemingly out of equal parts virtuosity and hubris. Carvey and Myers aren’t as virtuosic as Murphy, who may actually get closer to Sellers’ genius for disappearing into distinctive characters. Though they both seem genuinely tickled by the challenge of turning their funny voices and silly walks into an alternate dimension of shenanigans, it’s hard not to think about how neither comic has been better on film than they are in the more relaxed, less makeup-reliant Wayne’s World movies. Back in 2002, they seemed especially hellbent on mastering a near-impossible technique, as if hoping to fill the void each other had left. Temporarily, it worked, and the movies were hits, before they became endgames. Neither Myers nor Carvey would completely abandon their favorite comic touchstones; British-isms and presidential speeches still dominate their work. But they couldn’t self-populate their movies forever.

Jesse Hassenger is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com and tweets dumb jokes at @rockmarooned.