AUSTIN POWERS: INTERNATIONAL MAN OF MYSTERY
A film review by Andrew Hicks
Copyright 1997 Andrew Hicks / Fatboy Productions
(1997) ** (out of four)
I'd like to meet the executive who green-lighted this project and ask him that crucial word -- why? Mike Myers hasn't starred in a movie since 1993's SO I MARRIED AN AX-MURDERER, to which most people responded "So what?" Now he comes up with the brilliant idea to do a James Bond parody. Gee, and it's been almost a year since the last one, SPY HARD. That's two immediate strikes against AUSTIN POWERS and, enough lame jokes ensue that, in most ways, it's an even three strikes.
Still, that immature part of me that used to love Myers on "Saturday Night Live" back in the early '90s has a hard time stifling laughter every once in awhile. Yes, this movie could have written itself, given its unoriginal premise and mediocre star. We've got the requisite scene in which Myers tries to play a compact disc on a record turntable and the one where he sees a masculine-looking woman and tries to pull her "wig" off to reveal she's a man, but it's her real hair. Stop my sides from splitting. He even recycles the "Wayne's World" bit where he turns a couch into a canoe, an elevator and an escalator. Oh yeah, Garth finally got pubes...
The plot is as follows -- secret agent Austin Powers (Myers, naturally) was cryogenically frozen in 1967, when his adversary Dr. Evil (also played by Myers) also froze himself. Now it's 1997 and they're both thawed out. The world has advanced and left them in the swinging '60s, when a million dollars seemed like an exorbitant sum and free love was, well, free. However will they survive now that the world's gone on without them? It's THE BRADY BUNCH MOVIE all over again. And, come on, even the James Bond movie GOLDENEYE had fun with the notion of the Bond ideal being outdated.
Let's focus on Dr. Evil for a second. Myers experimented with multiple roles back in AX-MURDERER, and he's still no Peter Sellers. Here, he latches onto the Donald Pleasance version of Blofeld, complete with scar and cat, albeit a sickening-loooking hairless cat. There a few amusing moments when he tries to resume his '60s plans for world domination by cutting a hole in the ozone layer and again when he meets his angst-ridden teenage son, who of course spouts '90s cliches about parental relationships. In the end, Evil decides to go the age-old Bond route -- destruction via nuclear weapons.
There's a supporting cast too. Evil henchpeople like Random Task (the Odd Job clone), Alotta Fagina and #2 (Robert Wagner -- what's he doing in this movie?!) mingle with an unexplained cameo by Tom Arnold. Hugh Grant's prettier half, Elizabeth Hurley is the archetypal Bond girl, an agent Powers works with and tries all his worn '60s come-on techniques on. All of this is auto-pilot humor that I sincerely hope Myers didn't spend more than a few weeks writing.
Like any Myers movie, there are some funny moments mixed in with the pathetic ones. The entire subplot with with Dr. Evil and his son was inspired, from Evil proving he's hip by dancing the Macarena to sitting through group therapy with his son. Then there's probably the only original thing in the movie, when Powers is nude and a series of strategically-placed objects keep us from glimpsing his bits and pieces. When you go into a Mike Myers movie, the best you can hope for is a few scattered laughs. AUSTIN POWERS lives up to those lowered expectations.
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