Netflix's THE PENTAVARATE Seems to Be Truly Dreadful.

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If I start posting reviews here, and someone ever reads them, they'll learn very quickly that I am a critic who likes things, even things that other people hate. I like Batman vs. Superman. I LOVE the female Ghostbusters, and The Last Jedi is my favorite Star Wars movie. 

 But I really hate The Pentaverate, a Netflix episodic comic fantasy about a secret society influencing world events in which Michael Myers plays... sorry, I meant to say Mike Myers. How did I never notice before just now that the SNL actor and the fictional psycho killer have the same name!??   Start again. 

In The Pentaverate, Mike Myers, the real-life, non-murdering actor, plays most of the characters, and it feels like they're all desperately struggling for the spotlight.  In Austin Powers and its sequels, the main part of Myers' performance (Fat Bastard notwithstanding)  is built around two characters, Austin Powers and Dr. Evil, opposites who are ironic comments on each other.  Austin Powers, the hero, is brash, manic, and sexually aggressive, while Dr. Evil, the villain, is soft-spoken, demure, even a bit of a sweetie.  The two characters play off each other, and it helps that they rarely share a scene.  

In The Pentaverate, There's no room for this sort of nuance.  There's some genuine wit at work, and those who can overlook the unholy clusterfuck of accents, prosthetics and dick jokes should not be judged harshly.   I suppose that some will perceive the proficiency Myers demonstrates by playing eight characters as entertaining, but if this were eight actors playing eight characters,  each one crowding out the other's performance like this, this mess would be considered terrible.   I tapped out after three episodes, lest I pull a muscle from cringing too hard. 

 For me, The Pentaverate feels like watching THE LOVE GURU on five TVs at once.   Imagine that instead of four Marx Brothers, there were 12, and everyone was Groucho, even Margaret Dumont. The best joke is when one of the dozen or so Mike Myerses, the most impressive and uncanny of all of them, turns out to be Jennifer Saunders.   For a long moment, I was fooled. 

 You know what would have been great? If Shep Gordon (Alice Cooper's manager) had played himself, instead of Myers.  Wait a minute! is Shep Gordon dead? Now I'm even more depressed! 

Well, how about if, instead of Shep Gordon, Andy Kaufman was on The Pentaverate, having faked his death.   And Steve Jobs! And JFK! and they were played by different actors, who could actually interact, and they could play off each other! See that? I just invented a much better show, sitting here bareassed at the computer.

Andy Kaufman, in particular, is missed. He would have known what to do with this material. This feels like something Andy Kaufman would do just to fuck with us. 

 In 1963, one of the books my grandfather used to teach me reading was The Cat in the Hat.  Myers adapted it into a radioactive turd, but I actually sort of liked the Myers version.   I like Mike Myers, whose tragedy is that he is a terrific performer who for some reason makes godawful films. I wish him a long and satisfying career of doing cameos in other people's movies.