Smashing, Baby! Austin scores again by Wallace Baine Film writer Santa Cruz Sentinel
This summer, Austin Powers may pass Elvis Presley as the world's record holder for Most Bad Impersonations Inspired. The next time you have to endure a woeful `You're shagedelic, Baby!' on an answering machine, you're free to hate him for it. But let's be mature about this, shall we? Let's learn to separate the messiah from the fools who invoke his name. `Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me,' the second big-screen adventure of the horse-teethed Carnaby Street clown, is a howling good time, no matter how grating you may find the promotional hype. However poorly Mike Myers's nutty creation comes off on TV or magazine covers, the movie is a kaleidoscope of madcap brilliance where the star is not Austin, but Austin's insanely conceived world. `The Spy Who Shagged Me' is fundamentally a cascade of gags, many of them puerile and delightfully disgusting and the rest saucy send-ups of pop-culture clichés. In the long history of `Saturday Night Live' alums elevated to movie-star status, Myers is, in fact, one of the few (the only?) still doing `SNL'-style schtick, deftly adapting it to the feature-film format and brazenly appealing to his audience's smarts and its weakness for a well-executed poop joke. Playing three of the film's central characters and having co-written the script with `SNL' pal Michael McCullers, Myers is in full control of the Austin Powers persona. With the help of fun-loving director Jay Roach (who directed the original `Austin Powers'), Myers creates a set that captures the lightning-in-a-bottle feel of inspired improvised comedy. The result is an endless parade of sight gags, in-jokes, dopey sexual humor and wildly depraved -- but never over-the-top -- satire. For every joke that doesn't quite gel, there are four or five gems and one or two that are wet-your-pants funny. That makes for a pretty good batting average. When we last left Austin, he had landed the beautiful and highly shaggable Vanessa Kensington (Elizabeth Hurley). The new film opens with the couple's honeymoon which, for reasons best left under wraps, ends up with Austin a suddenly single swinger again. In no time, however, the International Man of Mystery is in the clutches of another stunning babe. CIA agent Felicity Shagwell (Heather Graham, in a star-making turn) -- the kind of gun-toting, Jaguar-driving, miniskirt-wearing sex kitten that only exists in the imaginations of 16-year-olds with extensive Playboy collections -- pops up to help Austin battle the notorious Dr. Evil (Myers again). The bald and effete Dr. Evil (who we first meet on the set of the Jerry Springer Show) hires a monstrously obese Scotsman named Fat Bastard (Myers yet again) to travel back in time to 1969 to extract Austin's `mojo' while Austin is cryogenically frozen. As a result, Austin tragically loses his libido at the moment of passion with a vamping Russian fashion model named (ha, ha) Ivana Humpalot (Kristen Johnston of `Third Rock from the Sun'). To recover the lead in his pencil, Austin himself goes back to 1969 and there is a great sense of infectious fun in Austin's scenes at the center of London's swingin' go-go scene, where he in fact he meets foxy Felicity, who almost immediately also wants a piece of Austin's power. Curiously, Austin Powers is not the catalyst for the movie's best humor. That honor belongs to the persnickety, pinkie-kissing Dr. Evil, a cackling bad guy with world-domination fantasies who has to deal with some hilariously contemporary problems: a disaffected teenage son and the awkwardness of a sudden sexual encounter with a co-worker. Disappointed by his sarcastic slacker son Scott, Evil creates a companion in his own likeness, a dwarf with the same bald head, gray suit and black heart he touchingly christens Mini-Me (Verne Troyer). Scott hates the little guy, Fat Bastard wants to eat him, but he brings out devoted love from the mad scientist who is taken to blurting out to his Mini-Me things like `You complete me' (smile, you `Jerry Maguire' fans). As a piece of short-attention-span comedy, `The Spy Who Shagged Me' pays attention to detail. The delights comes in diverse forms from unexpected cameos from the likes of Elvis Costello, Tim Robbins, Woody Harrelson and Burt Bacharach (a veteran of the first movie) to pointed spoofs of rap videos to the casting of Rob Lowe as villanous, one-eyed Robert Wagner's younger self to a series of deliciously dumb gags revolving around the synonyms for the male organ (high-brow it ain't). The main satirical scaffolding is, of course, the James Bond series. Bond fans will recognize a number of sly references to Bond films but 007 is only one of dozens of cultural allusions that will reward inveterate TV, pop music and movie hounds. Even product placement, skewered so well in Myers's pre-Austin hit `Wayne's World,' gets zinged. Starbucks, for instance, must have mixed feelings that one of its franchises serves as Dr. Evil's world-domination headquarters. Unlike another, much-hyped summer blockbuster (you hear me talking, Jar Jar?), `The Spy Who Shagged Me' lives up to its billing. It's less a cohesive story that a series of set pieces, each explosive in comic potential. To take one example, the scene of Myers as Fat Bastard, cocooned in realistic-looking latex fat lying naked in bed drooling and eating chicken while the lovely Felicity looks on in acute disgust is the kind of pungency that makes this movie such a devilish treat. By mixing arch pop-cult references with goofy, sexy fun and tossing in a handful of expertly drawn bodily-function vulgarities, Mike Myers has created a movie valentine to the under-30 crowd. Bow to Austin Powers, for he is the learned Doctor of Scatology. Smashing, baby. Simply smashing.
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