So I Married an Axe Murderer(1993) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski) |
|
| Mike Myers had two big
hits with the Wayne's World character back in the early
90's, and then had his Austin Powers smashes in the late
90s's. In between, he had kind of a dry spell, a four
year period between Wayne 2 and Powers 1, when was only
in one movie. This is it. If you liked Fat Bastard, you can see kind of an earlier bastard-in-progress in this film, in the form of Mike's Scottish father, also played by Mike (not surprisingly). Mike plays a guy afraid of commitment, and he always comes up with silly reasons to break up with a woman when they get too close, things like "she smells like soup". Just paranoid delusions. It runs in his family. His mom reads Weekly World News as her bible. Well, it's all delusions until he falls in love with Nancy Travis, a woman about whom his usual paranoid fantasies may really be true. I thought the best things about this movie were the cameo appearances by some of Myers' colleagues. Phil Hartman, Charles Grodin, Steven Wright, Alan Arkin, and "Kramer" provide some good moments, and of course Mike himself can be quite inspired. Alan Arkin was hilarious as the sensible, kindly, corporate-like police captain. His officers want him to act more like the police captains on TV, so he has to practice using cusswords and ethnic slurs. OK, so it's like an episode of SNL. Sometimes the sketches are funny, and sometimes they just ramble on humorlessly. Personally, I think 20 minutes of good Mike Myers comedy in a two hour movie isn't too bad. Where else you gonna get 20 minutes of good laughs? I can always read a book during the slow parts. By the way, Mike Myers in this movie appears to have the same job as Ozzie Nelson in Ozzie and Harriet. I know that in the evening he reads some poems in a jazz club. Does one get paid for that? Nancy Travis was seen in a steamed-up mirror. So it might not even be Nancy, who knows? And if it is you can't see jack anyway. IMDB summary: 6.3 out of 10. (Berardinelli gave it two stars, Ebert two and a half.) |