AUSTIN POWERS: INTERNATIONAL MAN OF MYSTERY
A film review by Serdar Yegulalp
Copyright 1997 Serdar Yegulalp
CAPSULE: Godawful "comedy" that's amazingly shabby and cut-rate, and rather bereft of laughs.
I was having a bad week in my life when I saw AUSTIN POWERS:INTERNATIONAL MAN OF MYSTERY. I desperately needed something to cheer me up, or at least distract me so I could get a clear head. Get some perspective. Even dumb movies can do that for me, sometimes.
I tried hard not to let my dejection affect my judgment, but I am certain now that AUSTIN POWERS would have also sucked rocks through bamboo shoots on the day I won the lottery. Michael Myers has taken a character that would barely have supported a five-minute sketch on SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE and stretched it to the length of a feature film, padding it out with toilet jokes and the sort of props-strategically-positioned-between-naked-actors-and-camera gags that Benny Hill got tired of fifteen years ago.
The plot, what little there is of it: Back in the Swinging Mod Hep Sixties (I don't think I'm doing a disservice to the movie's attempted early look and feel by describing it that way), sexy British secret agent Austin Powers tangled with his nemesis Dr. Evil. Evil launched himself into orbit and cryogenically forze himself to return decades later, when Powers was out of the picture. Powers also had himself frozen, and he wakes up to find the Nineties a very hard time to deal with.
The basic gag, that of Powers' total inability to cope with the Nineties, is not so much exhausted during the course of the movie as never even really dealt with. The bulk of the movie is taken up with dumb jokes of several basic rubrics: James Bond gags (of which this movie has no end, right down to the silly character names), inept slapstick, toilet humor, and strategically placed props... The movie's amazingly bereft of ideas, come to think of it, with a couple of bright exceptions. One is Dr. Evil's son -- there is a sidesplitting scene where father and son go to an encounter group, chaired by Carrie Fisher -- and the other is a throwaway gag where Austin mimics various forms of transportation from behind a couch (it's a visual gag -- hard to describe, and hard to recommend seeing the movie for).
A lot of Sixties kitsch has been resurrected and thrown on the screen for this movie, but it's desperate rather than clever. Instead of skewering the whole thing, it's a rather bloodless and unfunny tribute. Myers himself is also desperate: he's given an idea to play, not a character. Plus, the attempts to make the character work by giving him a relationship with another sexy (albeit "Nineties") agent are a waste of time. I wanted to have the movie end with him trying yet again to get it on with her, only to have her deck him one. With a couple of exceptions, the movie misses all of its own best moments.
The movie even looks cheesy, and not in a good way: I kept wondering if it had been transferred down from Hi-Def video or something, so grainy was the film stock in a good many scenes. The whole thing has the air of being done on the cheap.
My definition of comedy is simply: Did it make me laugh? The few times that I laughed in AUSTIN POWERS were completely offset by the time I spent cringing and wanting out. The most damning thing I could say about the movie is that Wayne and Garth would most likely have shoved it into Mike Tyson's shorts and sent it sailing.
One out of four flowers.
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