3 out of 5

Directed by: Thomas Schlamme

This movie kinda works for a lot of the same reasons it kinda doesn’t, and that’s very easily represented by what’s right up front: the name. ‘So I Married An Axe Murderer’ is a funny name for a film. Have it starring a hot-off-of-Wayne’s-World Mike Myers and toss in a slew of funny cameos – Steven Wright, Charles Grodin (during peak Grodin years), Phil Hartman – and surely you’re in for an SNL-adjacent laugh fest. Unfortunately, when you then craft the movie, structurally, as a thriller, making a punchline out of the movie’s tension casts things quite adrift; it’s a mismatch that immediately relegated the movie to the slightly clunky nethers of cultiness.

That mismatch is extended throughout the picture thanks to Myers being the star. Rewritten to embrace more of the actor’s humor, it’s true that the big laughs come from some of his antics – particularly via Myers’ double-billing as lead lovelorn poet Mike’s very Scottish father, Stuart – so do a fair amount of groans, due to the shoehorning in of some Myers catch phrases and plenty of mugging a la his SNL personas. In part, this can be covered as being Mike’s personality, but Mike is written more in the vein of the dark, droll comedy the film otherwise toys with, making that mugging especially distracting. The film kinda has no choice but to go off the rails towards the end, mixing lots of kicks-in-the-balls with a sloppy chase sequence, once more clumsily smooshing together the two modes in which the movie wants to operate.

Stuart is funny, but most of this stuff is funny despite itself: funny because it doesn’t quite work. However… there’s also some really hilarious stuff happening even when Myers is playing it straight, delivered well by Anthony LaPaglia, and Nancy Travis, and Adam Arkin, and many of the other stars / co-stars of the film. And though, title aside, the concept is telegraphed pretty clearly – marriage-shy Mike finds a girl he loves, then starts to map her past to that of an uncaught killer, who’s left a string of dead ex-lovers – the script (credited to Robbie Fox but tweaked by many) takes some fun procedural steps to establish that, and to get us to a crescendo. Which it bungles, because see above, but you still get a solid 80 minutes of goofiness prior to that, whether from the lowkey dark comedy side of the movie, or Myers’ reliable pantomime.