Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me

Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me

In “Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me,” there are some laughs, but they’re separated by noodling. You can tell when comedians know they have dead aim and are zeroing in for the kill. You can also tell when they don’t trust their material. The first “Austin Powers” movie had confidence; Mike Myers knew he was onto something. This time, too many scenes end flat, like those “Saturday Night Live” sketches that run out of steam before they’re done. “SNL” cuts to music or commercials; “Austin Powers” cuts to song-and-dance interludes.

A lot of the humor in the first film came from Powers’s being plopped down in a different century specifically, the 1960s to the 1990s where he was an old-fashioned sexist pig. The James Bond series was another target for satire. This second film wants less to be a satire than just zany raunchy slapstick.

“The Spy Who Shagged Me” seems to forget Austin is a man out of his time; there aren’t many jokes based on him being 30 years past his sell-by date, and there’s so much time travel in this movie that half the time he’s back in the ’60s again anyway. But even when he’s nominally back here in the ’90s, it seems like women take him on his own terms (though not as many as did last time around). Flush with success from part one, Myers and company seem to have forgotten that Austin is a misfit and not a hero

Austin and his arch-nemesis, Dr. Evil (both played by Myers), return in a plot that drags them through time (well, just back to the ’60s) and space (well, just to outer orbit). Banished from Earth orbit at the end of the last movie, Dr. Evil wants revenge on Austin Powers. Evil plans to travel back in time to when Powers was cryogenically frozen, steal his mojo (which looks like Kool-Aid with licorice ropes floating in it) and render him powerless. My guess is that this time around Evil has more screen time than Austin but I didn’t use a stopwatch.

There are several revelations: Early in the movie, during a sequence set on “The Jerry Springer Show,” Dr. Evil’s son Scott (Seth Green) appears and complains about how much he hates his dad; one character learns who his mother is “Star Wars”-style; and evil acquires a midget double named Mini-Me (played by Verne Troyer), inspired, Myers has said, by Marlon Brando as the little guy in “The Island of Dr. Moreau.” One babe did not make me laugh for an hour or so after I left the theater Heather Graham as lead babe Felicity Shagwell plays her as if she’s actually dedicated to her craft as a spy who shags people into submission but every other woman with dialogue including Elizabeth Hurley returning briefly from the first film got consistent laughs from me.

The most embarrassing moment for any actor comes when Graham goes to bed with Fat Bastard, a villain from Scotland who wears a kilt, weighs a metric ton and is covered with greasy chicken bits; while she does what she can do under the circumstances (and that’s certainly more than what anyone else could), you cringe for her throughout. Some confused viewers have asked me if they were the only ones who didn’t think this movie was funny. No, I tell them, you’re just not the audience for this movie I am. So if you didn’t think it was funny either, then maybe middle America will stay away from “The Spy Who Shagged Me” and we’ll both be happy.

The movie succeeds, however, in topping one of the best elements in the first film, which was when Austin’s private parts were obscured by a series of perfectly timed foreground objects. After Dr. Evil blasts off in a phallic spaceship, characters look up in the sky, see what the ship looks like, and begin sentences that are completed by quick cuts to other dialogue. (If I told you the names of some of the people you’d get the idea, but that wouldn’t be fair to the movie.) There is an underlying likability to Austin Powers that sort of carries us through the movie.

He’s such a feckless, joyful swinger that we enjoy his delight. Myers brings a kind of bliss to the Bond lifestyle. I also liked Seth Green as Evil’s son, not least because he has obviously studied Ebert’s Bigger Little Movie Glossary and knows all about the Fallacy of the Talking Killer. (When Evil gets Powers in his grasp, Evil’s son complains, “You never kill him when you have the chance to.”)

And the movie has fun by addressing the audience directly, as when Austin introduces Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello, or later observes, during a scene set in the British countryside but shot in the Los Angeles hills, “Funny how England looks in no way like Southern California.” Oh, and the tradition of homage to “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” continues with a bit part for Russ Meyer superstar Charles Napier.

This film obtained a PG-13 rating depressing evidence of how comfortable with vulgarity American teenagers are presumed to be. Apparently you can drink just as long as you don’t say it.

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