Shallow Plot, Disconnected Characters Sink 'Axe Murderer'

"So I Married an Axe Murderer" was just as good as "Wayne's World"--NOT! The new film staring Mike Meyers is as consistent as the latest episodes of "Saturday Night Live"--consistent in lacking real humor, that is.

The movie has a summer-fun romantic-comedy script that just doesn't work. Why? The only humor is generated by Mike Meyers and he doesn't have Dana Carvey to save him. And Meyers' humor, while engaging, is completely separate from the movie itself, which leaves the film fractured and depressing.

In the film Meyers plays Charlie McKenzie, who has paranoid delusions about all of his girlfriends, except of course the "axe murderer." The only other thing the audience knows about Charlie is that he is a 1990s beatnik cappucino-drinking poet.

This leaves the audience with many questions, such as, "Is this how he makes his living?" "Why doesn't he speak with an outrageous Scottish accent if his father does?" and "Where does he find all those black clothes?"

With all his "complexity," Charlie might as well be a backdrop from the "Saturday Night Live" set that Meyers walked off with--along with a good portion of the cast. Meyers ends up more or less holding a cardboard cutout of Charlie in front of his face as he does his cheap humor bit, a little like he does every week on TV. In fact, the character from Meyer's occasionally-shown Scottish store skit almost makes an appearance of his own when Meyers plays Charlie's Scottish father.

The movie is completely Mike Meyers and very little anyone or anything else. The other players follow Meyers' lead and work really hard to make their characters just as flat and uninteresting as Charlie.

The exception is the bride, played by Nancy Travis. Her character, Harriet, reaches a point where she is just as deep as any other romantic interest in a typical comedy--knee-deep, that is. But it's not the fact that the characters are two-dimensional that makes this movie disappointing; most comedies have flat characters. It's the fact that none of them have anything to offer the audience that sinks the film.

The movie has a summer-fun romantic comedy script that just doesn't work.

"Axe Murderer" is pure Caricature. Each character performs a little dance in front of the audience without connecting with any of the others. Watching each character on screen for a few frames with their own humor would work fine on a standup comedy show, or "Saturday Night Live," but not in a full-length film.

The movie was built on one idea that wasn't so bad, marrying an axe murderer. Unfortunately the film goes nowhere from there. The characters have no plot to hold them up, only an undeveloped concept. Without any outside support they're blown over by Meyers' gusts of independent energy.

It ends up feeling like the infamous Juice sketch on SNL where one bad thirty-second joke is stretched into a fifteen-minute skit. Instead, though, the movie is a fifteen-minute skit that is stretched out to an hour and a half with SNL players sprinkled around in one-shot roles.

A lot of the credit for the nonexistent consistency in the movie should go to the director, Thomas Schlamme. It takes a lot of skill to keep a wild actor like Meyers on track--skill which Schlamme obviously lacks. Fortunately for Schlamme, failure can be one of the best lessons. At least he put in some great scenes from San Francisco, complete with long pans of the Golden Gate Bridge.

This film isn't totally without redemption, though--the soundtrack is one of the rare bright spots. Adding groups such as Ned's Atomic Dustbin, Soul Asylum and Toad the Wet Sprocket was the movie's only stroke of genius. Obviously it was meant to attract a group of money-spending teenagers, even though the smartest of them will spend their money on the soundtrack and stay away from the theater.

Actually, that advice applies to everyone, not just the teenagers. Listen to the sound-track and turn on the TV if seeing Mike Meyers is a necessity. Don't worry about watching the reruns--it's not as though you're going to see anything new in "Axe Murderer."