Review: Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999)
So, in the wee early morning hours of Monday (well, not that early), while having my breakfast cereal, I see in the newspaper that “Austin Powers” has utterly crushed “Star Wars” this weekend. Ah, well, it’s definitely a funnier film.
Uttering “Austin Powers” and “Star Wars” in the same breath isn’t an outlandish thing. “Austin Powers” had at least a few “Star Wars” references, from its advertising campaign to the opening text crawl. We can take it a bit further, and say that Dr. Evil is, like, the lightsabre duel, Austin himself was sort of like the Pod Race, and no one was Jar Jar Binks. Well, I could have done with less Fat Bastard, but I don’t think, Fat Bastard Die Die Die. “Austin Powers” is a very consistently funny movie, without many soft spots. Some things go on for too long, like your typical SNL skit, but not many.
What plot there is centers on Dr. Evil going back in time to steal Austin’s mojo. This is basically an excuse to wander into all sorts of shameless product placements, the most inspired of which is the one for the new Volkswagen Beetle; psychedelic Sixties theme park fun with Heather Graham in short-shorts; and some very neat jokes with clueless, displaced Sixties personalities who have seen the future but have now been sent back to their home turf. Dr. Evil trying and badly failing to use late 1990s-isms was inspired (“One hundred billion dollars!”), a sort of conscious set of reversals from the usual man-out-of-time idioms. Austin himself was less interesting in this regard.
I’m starting to think that cultural critics of the 21st Century will recognize Jerry Springer as a brilliant auteur, conjuring forth a subtle performance art piece on a daily basis, casting it as a lewd talk show in order for his devastating social criticism of fin-de-siecle America to reach the widest audience in the most subversive way possible. But I could be wrong. I’ve only watched one of his shows, when I was on sick leave last year.
I actually didn’t like the original movie all that much. It plodded along: once you get the idea of spy movie-spoof guys from the 1960s trying to make it thirty years later, you have a lot of the joke. That’s material for half-hour sitcoms (South Park actually had a wonderful episode of this, with an ice man from 1996 being revived in 1999: Land’s End, Ace of Base, and the Internet was difficult to get on), not feature-length films. This new movie just works better by not paying much attention to that idea, by self-consciously pointing out how silly the movie is (“It’s remarkable how much the English countryside looks like southern California”, and the London street scene with sun-burnt hills in the background), and by playing with the aforementioned man-out-of-time-back-in-time jokes.
Oh, stay for the entire credits. Little skits in the credits. And the DVD for this movie _must_, absolutely _must_ have karaoke.