AUSTIN POWERS: THE SPY WHO SHAGGED ME A film review by David N. Butterworth Copyright 1999 David N. Butterworth
**1/2 (out of ****)
Austin Powers has lost his mojo all right. And so, unfortunately, has Mike Myers.
In this much-anticipated follow-up to 1997's "Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery," Myers and his co-conspirators have missed a wonderful opportunity to improve upon the original film and given us instead a wildly uneven romp which misses about twice as much as it hits.
The dark forces in "Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me" draw consistently bigger laughs than the swinging secret agent and his latest shag-pad material, CIA operative Felicity Shagwell (a stunningly awful Heather Graham).
Dr. Evil (Myers) is back, hysterically so, as is his right-hand woman, the Rosa Klebb-styled Frau Farbissina (Mindy Sterling, still having a blast). They're joined by Dr. Evil's delinquent son (Seth Green, also terrific) and an obese Scot with the catchy moniker of Fat Bastard. Played by Myers under what seems to be three metric tonnes of makeup and prosthetics, Fat Bastard is a repulsive cross between Monty Python's Mr. Creosote (from "The Meaning of Life") and Charlie MacKenzie's father in "So I Married an Axe Murderer." Myers has the accent down perfectly and his Fat Bastard is a welcome, if gross, addition to the film's eccentric roster of villains.
Also in tow in "The Spy Who Shagged Me" is a one-eighth-the-size
version of Dr. Evil. "I shall call him
Whenever the bad guys are on screen, especially Dr. Evil, the film is a hoot. One of the film's funniest lines comes when Dr. Evil is going through his "zip it" routine with his son Scott. But the writers don't do anything with Austin except to land him with the great-looking but hopelessly-afloat Graham. A brief but satisfying appearance by the original film's Elizabeth Hurley only reinforces just how bad Graham is.
Austin flashes his bad teeth and growls "groovy baby, yeah!" but his character is becoming very repetitive and Myers himself doesn't seem to know how to extend his creation. So the film settles for a lot of unwelcome bathroom and bodily orifice humor. And I mean a lot. Austin Powers accidentally mistaking a stool sample for coffee? Felicity "retrieving" things from Austin on all-fours in silhouette? You have to believe that Myers and his co-writer Michael McCullers can do better, much better, than that.
"Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me" has some terrific sight gags, several outrageously funny product placements, a bunch of inspired cameo performances (Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello *not* included), a cleverly-edited sequence in which various people comment on the phallic nature of Dr. Evil's spaceship, and a wonderful throng of evildoers who ham it up at every possible opportunity.
But for those of us who expect a little more from the extremely talented Mike Myers, the psychedelic love machine in his Carnaby Street duds is--at least for the time being--all shagged out.
-- David N. Butterworth dnb@dca.net
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