Chuck Leonard

I'm a huge Mike Myers fan, and I anxiously await every project. I’m a huge afficianado of the first two Austin Powers movies, both Wayne’s Worlds, and I even enjoyed The Love Guru. (And he was hilarious hosting The Gong Show.) I loved much of The Pentaverate – lots of it was Myers’ best work – and I got a little bored during some of it, and for one reason: It was too long. I felt like I was watching a really hilarious ninety-minute Mike Myers movie that was stretched out to fill the length of a three hour series, and I think that if somebody ever comes in and whittles it down to an hour and a half, it will be considered right up there with Myers’ best work. Keegan Michael Key and Ken Jeong come off especially well. Hilariously funny for the first four episodes, but then I felt like the last two episodes got bogged down by endless expository scenes, scenes with other characters (the Jennifer Saunders bits, which I know a lot of people like, are hard to stomach due to her grotesque makeup), and even by Myers’ standards, the show becomes too crude. (I’m not a prude, but I’ve never heard him being so reliant on the F word before. It doesn’t add anything to the script.) Also, narrator Jeremy Irons keeps explaining how “nice” the Pentaverate members are, but we don’t see much of the niceness. And apparently the organization’s current aim is to stop global warming, but we never see them working on this in the series. Some critics are writing that Myers’ humor is antiquated. It’s not – it’s still timeless and brilliantly funny, just as Benny Hill and Monty Python are. I especially loved the Lichtenstein Guard's nod to Peter Sellers and “The Mouse that Roared.” (For some reason, nobody else is picking up on that.) On a trite “one-to-ten” scale, I would give this a six… but there’s a nine or a ten lurking inside of it, if Myers ever decides to cut it down to ninety minutes.