Director: Jay Roach
Cast: Mike Myers, Elizabeth Hurley, Michael York, Mimi Rogers
Have I Seen It Before?: I was 12, going on 13 when the movie came out. If there was anyone for whom it was made, it was I.
Did I like it?: We all remember for about half an hour twenty years ago, we all latched on to the notion of the Austin Powers. Not because he was terribly funny, not because his throwback to a simpler age appealed to us, but mainly because he was a Gollum of catchphrases that we all could sort of do an impression of. Time passed, probably a mixture of 9/11 and Austin Powers in Goldmember (2002) happened, and we all moved on.
But as I continue my willy nilly re-watch of the Bond films (I will eventually force myself to watch Moonraker (1979) again, I swear), I thought it might be time to give Austin and company another shot. The first one had to be somewhat good, right?
Eh.
There is a slavish devotion to the work of directors Guy Hamilton, Terrence Young and Lewis Gilbert, along with the delightful production design of Ken Adam and the brassy sounds of John Barry, but there’s not a lot of wit in those references. It is merely showing us things that we might recognize from other films, in hopes that it might elicit something resembling a laugh from the audience. This feels like the intermediate infection point between the sublime joy of films like Airplane (1980) and The Naked Gun: From The Files of Police Squad! (1988) and the witless pains of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer. Tragically this film seems just as interested as lovingly referencing the early Bond films as it is in adopting an affect more akin to Casino Royale (1967).
Please, don’t make me re-watch the first Casino Royale feature. I beg of you.
And the humor that is on display here isn’t much to write home about. It aims at the lowest common denominator, and while that may make this reviewer read as stuffier than he might hope, I can only offer this in my defense: I remember laughing so hard in the 1990s that I hit my head at the sequence in the bathroom with Tom Arnold when Austin (Myers*) screams at a henchman, “Who does Number Two work for?” Today? Nearly nothing. I didn’t think the Swedish-made Penis enlarger was terribly funny on first blush, so the repeated call backs and the decades have done it no favors. Even the zany sort of non-sequiturs that absolutely rely on surprise to delight have long since lost their luster.
But I’m sure the series is just warming up, right?
*Still keeping a tenuous grasp on his Peter Sellers worship, although this will be the final film before the experiment completely escapes from the lab.