capsule : godawful " comedy
" that 's amazingly shabby and cut - rate , and rather bereft of laughs
.
i was having a bad week in my life when i saw austin powers :
international man of mystery .
i desperately needed something to cheer me up , or at least distract me so i could get a clear head .
get some perspective .
even dumb movies can do that for me , sometimes .
i tried hard not to let my dejection affect my judgment , but i am certain now that austin powers would have also sucked rocks through bamboo shoots on the day i won the lottery .
michael myers has taken a character that would barely have supported a five - minute sketch on saturday night live and stretched it to the length of a feature film , padding it out with toilet jokes and the sort of props - strategically - positioned - between - naked - actors - and - camera gags that benny hill got tired of fifteen years ago .
the plot , what little there is of it : back in the swinging mod hep sixties ( i do n't think i 'm doing a disservice to the movie 's attempted early look and feel by describing it that way ) , sexy british secret agent austin powers tangled with his nemesis dr .
evil .
evil launched himself into orbit and cryogenically forze himself to return decades later , when powers was out of the picture .
powers also had himself frozen , and he wakes up to find the nineties a very hard time to deal with .
the basic gag , that of powers ' total inability to cope with the nineties , is not so much exhausted during the course of the movie as never even really dealt with .
the bulk of the movie is taken up with dumb jokes of several basic rubrics : james bond gags ( of which this movie has no end , right down to the silly character names ) , inept slapstick , toilet humor , and strategically placed props . . .
the movie 's amazingly bereft of ideas , come to think of it , with a couple of bright exceptions .
one is dr .
evil 's son -- there is a sidesplitting scene where father and son go to an encounter group , chaired by carrie fisher -- and the other is a throwaway gag where austin mimics various forms of transportation from behind a couch ( it 's a visual gag -- hard to describe , and hard to recommend seeing the movie for ) .
a lot of sixties kitsch has been resurrected and thrown on the screen for this movie , but it 's desperate rather than clever .
instead of skewering the whole thing , it 's a rather bloodless and unfunny tribute
.
myers himself is also desperate : he 's given an idea to play , not a character .
plus , the attempts to make the character work by giving him a relationship with another sexy ( albeit " nineties " ) agent are a waste of time .
i wanted to have the movie end with him trying yet again to get it on with her , only to have her deck him one .
with a couple of exceptions , the movie misses all of its own best moments .
the movie even looks cheesy , and not in a good way : i kept wondering if it had been transferred down from hi - def video or something , so grainy was the film stock in a good many scenes .
the whole thing has the air of being done on the cheap .
my definition of comedy is simply : did it make me laugh ?
the few times that i laughed in austin powers were completely offset by the time i spent cringing and wanting out .
the most damning thing i could say about the movie is that wayne and garth would most likely have shoved it into mike tyson 's shorts and sent it sailing .
the movie misses all of its own best moments it 's desperate rather than clever looks cheesy , and not in a good way inept slapstick , toilet humor the bulk of the movie is taken up with dumb jokes amazingly bereft of ideas godawful " comedy " that 's amazingly shabby and cut - rate , and rather bereft of laughs cringing and wanting out padding it out with toilet jokes would have also sucked rocks through bamboo shoots a rather bloodless and unfunny tribute