Summer of 1993: So I Married an Axe Murderer
Mike Myers tries to be a character actor and leading man, with mixed results.
As I said in last week’s look back at Coneheads, it’s hard to overstate how much of a smash hit Wayne’s World was in 1992. When a movie makes $180 million on a $20 million budget, it stands to reason that everyone wants to replicate that success. One tactic was to keep mining Saturday Night Live intellectual property, which Paramount would do throughout the ‘90s, to diminishing returns.
For studios that didn’t have access to the SNL cash cow, the answer was to seek success through the show’s stars.
That, of course, was not a new approach. Since the end of the show’s first season, when Chevy Chase quit to pursue a movie career, SNL has been one of the most reliable star-makers. The biggest names in comedy in the 1970s and 80s – Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi and Eddie Murphy – got their start there. When the show hit a fallow period in the ‘80s, it stopped being much of a big-screen kingmaker, but Wayne’s World and the arrival of a hip, young cast in the 1990s helped change that, and I’m part of the generation that flocked to anything in which Adam Sandler, Chris Farley and others showed up.
Of course, given that it was Wayne’s World that ignited this success, it made sense that studios would seek what else stars Mike Myers and Dana Carvey could do for them. Carvey would headline a few films in 1994 – including Clean Slate and Trapped in Paradise – but his skills as an impressionist and character actor meant he was best suited for television, and he tried his hand at an infamous (and underrated) sketch comedy show in 1996. For what it’s worth, health issues and other complications meant Carvey never got the career I think he deserved; if you’ve ever heard him on Conan O’ Brien’s podcast, it’s apparent he’s one of the quickest and funniest minds out there.
Myers got his first star vehicle in the summer of 1993, just a week after Paramount’s Coneheads debuted, but it wasn’t the launch he was hoping for. So I Married an Axe Murderer cost about as much to make as Wayne’s World but didn’t even make back its budget. It opened completely outside the top 10 – even on more than 1,300 screens – at number 12, for $3.4 million, and limped to $11 million total. It ended up making less than Coneheads, itself seen as a financial disappointment, although its Rotten Tomatoes score of 53% is still better than that film’s anemic 35%.
In recent years, though, the film has had a bit of a reassessment and found a place as a cult classic. I have a friend who’s been on my case to see it for a few years. So, I figured this was the perfect chance to see if this was another of those SNL-adjacent comedies that was a secret comedic gem.
And…it’s not. But it’s also not completely dead on arrival, and I think it likely provided some clarity and direction for Myers. It’s a comedy that I wish worked a lot better than it does.
Bad poetry and meat cutes
Myers stars as Charlie, a beat poet living in San Francisco. The film beings with the most 90s opening ever, following a ginormous cup of coffee as it makes its way from the barista while “There She Goes” by the La’s plays for the first of many, many times on the soundtrack. The film never specifies what Charlie’s job is; he seems to just hang at the coffee shop – one of those giant, ‘90s coffee shops where people dress in oversized clothes and there’s a mural of a roadmap on the back wall – and occasionally get up to present poetry. I don’t know if he’s making money through the poetry and, if so, he’s being overpaid because it’s quite bad. It’s just the same poem over and over, inserting his latest ex-girlfriend’s name along with some uncomfortable confessions about his sexual attractions to cartoon characters. He also hangs out with his buddy Tony (Anthony LaPaglia),a police detective who wishes his boring job were more like it was in the movies.
Charlie’s a commitment-phobe who constantly has a string of lame reasons and suspicions why he broke up with his latest girlfriend (this was a go-to joke for all single, male characters on TV and in the movies in the 1990s). But one day he meets lovely butcher Harriet (Nancy Travis) and is instantly smitten. The two hit it off – enough so that he brings her home to meet his very Scottish parents, played by Brenda Fricker and, in a dual role, Myers. Everything is going well until Charlie discovers his mom reading a tabloid magazine story about a woman who kills her husbands on their wedding nights and, wouldn’t you know it, Harriet coincidentally has prior friends and relationships who match the descriptions of the victims.
It’s a fun idea, but director Thomas Schlamme – who went on to a decade-long collaboration with Aaron Sorkin where they created The West Wing, Sports Night and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip – doesn’t engage it. For a movie like this to work, there needs to be either a farcical, focused energy or a commitment to style that builds suspense while balancing the humor. But Axe Murderer doesn’t seem too interested in building any tension about whether Harriet really is a serial killer. There’s no black humor, bloody misunderstandings or sequences where Charlie thinks his life is in peril (until the very end, when the film goes shrill instead of tense). In fact, Schlamme, working from a script by Robbie Fox that was apparently rewritten heavily once Myers became involved, seems much more interested in this being just another slacker romantic comedy about a guy looking for reasons not to engage in a relationship.
And that could work, except that Charlie is not a compelling character. In fact, he’s highly annoying. I don’t know whether his poetry is supposed to be purposefully bad, but it’s not funny – Myers seems to think the very existence of a beat poet is hilarious, and his poems consist largely of screaming and pop culture blather. It’s not funny, intentionally or no. And Charlie is both a drip of a character – constantly looking for reasons to break up with his girlfriend (although “she smelled like soup” is kind of funny) — and annoying, engaging in antics that are supposed to give Myers a chance to be charming but are just off-putting. When he decides to go back to the butcher shop to see Harriet a second time after only a brief encounter, he volunteers to help and ends up doing shtick with the meat that is unhygienic, wasteful and, worse, extremely aggravating.
Travis is fine, and seems invested in the opportunity to co-lead a romantic comedy, and she has a lot of charm. But Myers seems completely uninterested in playing a real person, and holds back any energy from his romantic dialogue. In other sequences, he launches into shtick that is never funny, working with dialogue that has no bite. It’s an empty performance, and it leaves the movie without a center of gravity.
Which is a real shame. Because when the movie takes the focus off its protagonist, there’s some interesting and funny stuff in the margins.
If it’s not Scottish, it’s crap!
Strangely, Myers is both the best and worst thing in So I Married an Ax Murderer. As Charlie, he’s completely devoid of charisma and charm. But as Charlie’s Scottish dad, who spends the movie wandering around the house behind oversize glasses and verbally abusing everyone, he’s really funny.
Myers loves playing Scottish characters, of course, and less than 10 years later, he’d bring the same growling brogue to Fat Bastard and Shrek. Charlie’s dad appears to be a distant cousin to the surly Scottish shop owner Myers played on SNL, and the actor seems much more interested in the comedic opportunities of the supporting role than in any chance to be a romantic leading man. I particularly loved the character’s constant beratement of Charlie’s younger brother and his fixation on the size of the kid’s head.
As I said earlier, Myers was apparently involved in heavily rewriting Fox’s script, and I’m not sure who’s responsible for what, but there are weird comedic moments that hint at a more interesting – although probably not more cohesive – movie. LaPaglia is really funny as the cop who wishes all the film clichés were true, but it’s Alan Arkin, as his milquetoast boss who’s happy to indulge him, who really steals the show. Phil Hartman shows up for one scene as an Alcatraz tour guide and walks away with the movie’s funniest line (“My name is John Johnson but everyone here calls me Vicky”). Amanda Plummer as Harriet’s sister and (spoiler) the true villain of the story brings an off-kilter energy that comes the closest to capturing the tone that someone like Joe Dante could have brought to this. And Michael Richards – who also popped up in the first scene of Coneheads – appears in a gratuitous cameo that also hints at a more cleverly written final project.
There is funny stuff here, and I don’t fault anyone who likes the movie because of that. But it orbits a black hole that snuffs the rest of the movie’s energy. I wish the movie was looser and more engaged and less invested in the whole romantic comedy portion. The back half-hour – when Charlie is actually married to the alleged ax murderer – is rushed and frantic, completely at odds with the tone that came before but not invested in any style that could make either the suspense or parody work. Like Coneheads – but a tad more successful – it’s a movie that’s funniest at the edges, but almost unbearable at its center.
But it seems to have shown Myers that he had no interest in being a leading man and, instead, should focus on characters. A few months after Axe Murderer bombed, Wayne’s World 2 disappointed at the box office (although it’s a better movie than its reputation suggests). Myers wouldn’t be seen in anything for four more years, but when he returned in 1997, it was with Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, a cult hit that ended up spawning a highly successful trilogy. And, of course, Shrek was an even bigger hit. Myers never once played a traditional lead and, with mixed success, stuck to either comedic creations of his own design or bit parts in other people’s movies (he’s quite fun in his one scene in Inglourious Basterds). Today, he pops up in weird things, playing the host of The Gong Show under heavy makeup or last year’s Netflix flop The Pentaverate (which has its roots in the conspiracy theories Charlie’s father spouts here). He’s not always successful and, in my opinion, his shtick can wear thin. But it’s better than watching him sleepwalk through this non-comedy.