Pete's Meteor

Pete's Meteor
Pete's Meteor
	DVD cover
Directed by	Joe O'Byrne
Written by	Joe O'Byrne
Produced by	John S. Lyons; Liam O'Neill
Starring	Brenda Fricker; Alfred Molina; Mike Myers
Cinematography	Paul Sarossy
Edited by	Marie-Thérèse Boiché
Music by	Richard Hartley
Distributed by	KC Medien
Release date	1998;
Running time	104 minutes
Country	Ireland
Language	English

Pete's Meteor is an Irish 1998 drama film. It was written and directed by Joe O'Byrne and stars Mike Myers.

Mike Myers plays a drug dealer living in the slums of Dublin. He tries to financially provide for the three children of his dead brother. The children's lives are forever changed when a meteor crashes into their backyard. Alfred Molina plays a wealthy scientist that the children must confront to retrieve their heaven-sent gift.

Production and Release

The Irish Film Board gave the filmmakers almost IR£300,000 for the production.^[1]

It won the Crystal Bear Special Mention award for Best Feature Film at the 1999 Berlin International Film Festival. Despite this, the film failed to find a distributor, and was released direct-to-video in the United States in December 2002.

In a 2002 profile of Myers in The Independent, the film was said to have "proved meteoric in the way it vanished from view".^[2]

Reception

Christopher Null of Contactmusic.com awarded the film two stars out of five and wrote, “The story doesn't help matters, and sheer insanity is not much of a substitute for actual character development.”^[3]

Nathan Rabin of The Dissolve gave the film a negative review and wrote, “It doesn’t help that the child actors deliver performances so terrible, they may actually persuade audiences to root against a trio of hard-luck orphans.” Rabin also added, “I recommend Pete’s Meteor to bad-movie aficionados.”^[4]

References

^ Lawrence, John (12 February 2001). "Millions wasted on flick flops". Evening Herald. Dublin.
^ "Mike Myers: Why does everyone want to get into bed with him?". www.independent.co.uk. Archived from the original on 22 December 2015. Retrieved 21 March 2024.
^ Null, Christopher. "Pete's Meteor". Contactmusic.com. Retrieved 10 June 2022.
^ "You Might Also Like: Mike Myers shows his maudlin side in Pete's Meteor". thedissolve.com. Archived from the original on 20 September 2014. Retrieved 21 March 2024.