P L U S

Hollow Reed
Reviewed by
Charles Taylor

Mike Myers' swingin' sendup of James Bond and groovy Carnaby Street lands with a thud, baby!

"Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery," the new spy movie satire and Mike Myers vehicle, contains about 10 minutes of giddy hilarity, and that's about it. At the picture's midpoint, its contraption of a plot rattles to a brief, blessed halt at the meeting of a group therapy session, led by a gooey, beaming Carrie Fisher and populated by bullet-headed dad-and-son duos. The movie's arch-villain, Dr. Evil (Myers), has returned from a 30-year-long cryogenic hiatus to find that during his absence his underlings have hatched him a test-tube son, Scott, now a sullen adolescent in a Kurt Cobain T-shirt. Scott complains of career pressures from Dad, who expects him to inherit the family business of dominating the free world.

"What would you like to do?" oozes Fisher. "Well, I like animals, so maybe I could be a vet." "An evil vet?" his father asks hopefully. "No! You see what he does to me? ... Or maybe I could be a zoo keeper." "An evil zoo keeper?"

The scene concludes when, urged to "tell us about yourself," Dr. Evil, his scarred, bald, egg-shaped head perched atop a rigid, Nehru-jacketed torso, blithely launches into a demented autobiography resembling the creation of some dime-store Nabokov, about a Belgian father who "claimed to have invented the question mark" and "would accuse chestnuts of laziness."

Aside from that scene, "Austin Powers" fails to live up to its promise of gleefully juxtaposing the cheesy "sophistication" of '60s spy movies, and the swingin' pop culture that inspired them, with the straightened temperament of the '90s. It's an inspired notion, and audiences seemed primed to love the movie's eponymous hero (also played by Myers), with his velvet bell-bottomed suit, stained buck teeth and quaint lingo ("Let's shag, baby!"), from the moment he's defrosted to do battle with his nemesis. But unlike Myers' most famous creation, Wayne of "Wayne's World," Austin Powers never transcends his cartoonish origins, and the movie leans far too hard on its art direction for laughs. All the psychedelic wallop -- a frugging Carnaby Street production number with Austin wackily fleeing his squealing, mini-skirted fans, a club called the Electric Psychedelic Pussycat Swingers' Club, Mimi Rogers karate-chopping Diana Rigg-style in a leather catsuit -- gets packed into the film's first few minutes, and it never quite recovers the same headlong giddiness.

Myers' comic gifts depend on his essential sweetness -- for all of Wayne's TV-addled, head-banging adolescent posturing, he was always a mensch at heart, and clearly destined for better things. No doubt the years Myers spent playing Wayne on "Saturday Night Live" helped him build depth into the character; the sly delight of Wayne is just how much more there is to him than what he seems. "Wayne's World" felicitously combined the kind of broad humor that keeps kids happy with a lovely emotional generosity that grown-ups couldn't resist.

"Austin Powers," however, lurches from feeble stabs at wit to fart jokes, and pursues neither comic strategy with enough energy to please either faction of the audience. The kind of scatology that Hollywood considers essential to making big-budget movies profitable these days only works when it achieves the manic pitch of gagfests like "Dumb and Dumber." Meanwhile, those hoping for absurdist humor or pointed jokes based on Austin's '60s-to-'90s culture shock will yawn through the endless bathroom scenes. Without a genuinely charming central character to pull it together, the movie is a shamble of tedious passages punctuated by a few desultory chuckles.

The other characters in "Austin Powers" have to keep telling each other that Austin is "really rather sweet" because Myers himself doesn't seem entirely sure of that fact. No one had to point out Wayne's inner excellence; he simply radiated it. But Austin walks a dicey line between innocence and complacency, sexual liberation and sleaze, and it's never clear exactly where he stands. As his fellow agent and love interest, the impossibly pretty Elizabeth Hurley at first grimaces in disgust at Austin's ludicrous attempts at seduction, but every time she turns away, she's hiding an indulgent smile. He wins her over at last with Burt Bacharach and goofy schtick, and her initial resistance gets written off to "a bug up (her) butt."

But the biggest joke in "Austin Powers" ought to be the utter naiveté of what Austin sees as sophistication -- his generation's dippy notion that freedom could ever be a simple proposition. We're older and wiser now, not just "uptight" or freaked out by AIDS. Bumping Austin's optimism up against feminism, multiculturalism, multinational corporatism, the recovery movement, New Agism and a host of other contemporary fixations could have generated much edgier humor -- at our expense, as well as his. Or, at the very least, Myers could have been wackier, or warmer -- he's the creator of Dieter and Linda Richman (the "Coffee Talk" lady), after all. Instead, he falls back on flaccid parodies of spy film conventions -- the elaborate execution devices of Dr. Evil, coy attempts to veil frontal nudity -- in pale imitation of classics like "Casino Royale" and "What's New Pussycat?" Even in the '60s, people knew this stuff was silly.

In the end, "Austin Powers" feels hopelessly compromised, a would-be carefree comedy whose conception must have been anything but. Here's hoping Myers figures out how to develop new characters in an environment freer from the mass-market financial imperatives that hound big Hollywood productions. Sometimes the only way to win everybody's heart is to stop chasing it.
May 2, 1997

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