"Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery" seemed unlikely to spawn a franchise when it was originally released two years ago. Coming out in the weeks between the mega-hyped "The Lost World" and "Batman and Robin," the Mike Meyers comedy passed through cinemas with little notice, attracting a small following and amassing a passable box office take on its way to the Blockbuster shelves.
With most movies, that would be the end of the story. But in the months after its video debut, "Austin" became a word-of-mouth sensation, and people who never even considered seeing the film during its theatrical run now found themselves looking for opportunities to drop phrases such as "shagadelic" and "oh, behave" into conversations, just to show their friends they were intimately familiar with Austinspeak. While "Lost World" and "Robin" proved to be flashes in the pan, cheerfully leering secret agent Austin Powers and his fatuous nemesis Dr. Evil became cult figures. "Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me" is a perfectly disrespectful follow-up, which brings back all the major players from the original, adds a few welcome new faces and finds a whole new list of old movies, TV shows and commercials for Meyers to parody or pay tribute to.
It takes a bright writer to make something that's simultaneously this idiotic and this consistently funny, and, as Meyers has shown time and again, he's a pretty smart cookie, as well as a walking pop culture catalogue. "The Thomas Crown Affair," "You Only Live Twice," "Time Tunnel," "Jerry Maguire" and, unsurprisingly, "Star Wars" all get skewered this time around. There's also a hilarious, devestating mockery of Will Smith's rip-off rap hits that ought to make the one-time Fresh Prince feel like he's reached his expiration date.
The usual rule in making a sequel is to take what worked the first time and merely repeat it on a more elaborate scale. But if anything, "Shagged" seems tighter and more conservative than its predecessor, perhaps because Meyers has so much he wants to do he doesn't have footage or money to waste on grandoise jokes. Even the bits reprised from "Man of Mystery" have been given an extra spin.
One of the biggest laugh-getters the first time around was how the filmmakers managed to come up with jaw-droppingly smutty sight gags and still maintain their PG-13 rating. They haven't lost their knack: The movie's opening -- an apparent send-up of the famous "Barbarella" credit sequence which featured Jane Fonda doing an anti-gravity striptease -- finds Austin cavorting in a hotel stark naked, his nether regions covered by such items as a banana, a brisket, a pinwheel and a pair of hams. Another scene involving silhouettes in a tent manages to go even further.
The storyline of "Shagged" -- probably an afterthought -- brings Dr. Evil (Meyers again) back from deep space, just in time to appear on Jerry Springer with his endlessly glum son Scott (Seth Green) in an episode entitled "My Father is Evil and Wants to Take Over the World." The dysfunctional Evil clan is still rife with conflict, primarily because Scott thinks his father is a loser and Dad argues that the boy is only "quasi-evil, just one calorie, not evil enough." An outrageous new addition to the family only serves to widen the generation gap.
Meanwhile, Austin, single again after his wife Vanessa (Elizabeth Hurley) was unmasked as one of Dr. Evil's lethal "fembots," is swinging through the 1990s ("I put the 'grrr' in 'swinger,' baby," he boasts), until Evil uses a time machine to fly back to 1969 London and steal that which is most precious to our hero: his mojo. Soon Austin too is back on Carnaby Street in its heyday, shopping for groovy new threads with his hip American partner partner Felicity Shagwell (Heather Graham, who has enough spunk to offset her visible lack of comic timing), hitting the go-gos, and, in his spare time, looking for a way to keep Evil from using a laser cannon to blow up Washington, D.C.
Some have chosen to see Austin as a take-off on James Bond, but "Shagged" acknowledges his real origin by including a clip from "In Like Flint," the 1966 James Coburn movie about a spy who spent more time coming on to the band of power-hungry superwomen trying to take over the world than he did trying to thwart them. Check out "Flint" or one of Dean Martin's brazenly sexist Matt Helm epics from the same period and you'll see Austin and Bond look almost puritanical by comparison. James Sanford
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