Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery
with Mike Myers, Elizabeth Hurley, Robert Wagner, Michael York
Written by Mike Myers
Directed by Jay Roach (New Line)
By William Ham
“Dying is easy. Comedy is hard,” or so said some fruity thespian just before he croaked, winning himself immortality and an entry in Bartlett’s Big Book of Deathbed Cliches in the process. Nowhere is this axiom more consistently proven than in Hollywood these days, to the point that it’s become tough to extract three minutes of genuine chortles for the damn trailers anymore. Movie comedy, at the century mark, has largely regressed to second childhood, to one Keystone Kops move after another. Observational humor, satire, and sharp parody (which, at its best, edges into satire) are lost to meticulously choreographed large-scale mayhem. Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with rude, coarse humor – some of the best comedies of the last quarter-century, from The Producers and Bananas, to Caddyshack and The Naked Gun, have been broad, anarchic, and extremely silly. What they also had, however, was finesse, attention to detail, and a willingness to push themselves to the edge in search of laughs. Comedy is a gamble, and its best practitioners know when to go for broke. There are precious few gamblers in mainstream comedy these days, and after Jim Carrey nearly scared off his under-12 constituency with The Cable Guy (a film that will ultimately be looked upon as his masterpiece, I suspect), there aren’t likely to be many more. Who’da thunk that Mike Myers would be the one to step up to the table, lay all his remaining chips down, and let it ride?
Myers, of course, has spent the last few years in that ignoble limbo reserved for ex-Saturday Night Live cast members. He hit it big with the enormous success of Wayne’s World (1992), a picture that captured the Zeitgeist of the moment when the suburban metalhead was in mid-morph to slackerdom, and, like many others who enjoy massive success in a brief period of time, suffered a precipitous decline. Wayne’s World 2 (1993) actually improved on the original, and So I Married an Ax Murderer (1993), while an ungodly mess, bore a wholly original strain of ethnic humor (how many Scottish-American comedies can you name?), but neither lived up to their commercial expectations, and after Myers made the grave error of sticking around SNL half a season too long, he promptly disappeared from view, likely to spend the rest of his career trading on the echoes of his once-fresh characters and catch phrases, locked in a Ryme of the Ancient Comedian with the words “As if!” draped, albatross-like, over his neck. In this context, the re-affirmation of his talents that is Austin Powers is positively miraculous.
By rights, it should have been disastrous: it’s got a way-overused fish-out-of-water plot, rampant juvenile innuendo, urination and defecation jokes, a leading man with an affinity for look-at-me-aren’t-I-cute mannerisms when the gags aren’t there, and a cameo appearance by Tom Arnold. So why does it work so famously? First of all, Myers knows his genres, to the point of creating an instantly recognizable parody of a form that didn’t quite exist – the flamboyantly swinging super-spy film, James Bond on Carnaby Street. The first ten minutes, set in 1967 London, are a rapid-fire film-buff’s dream, referencing A Hard Day’s Night, Blow-Up, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (!!), and The Avengers (any opportunity to get Mimi Rogers into Diana Rigg’s leather jumpsuit is always welcome) in quick succession, as well as aping the color scheme and editing of late-sixties Brit cinema to an absolute T. But the kicker is Myers’ title character, a rotten-toothed, horn-rimmed, winkle-pickered English grotesque who the birds, for some occult reason, all want to shag. His nemesis, Dr. Evil (Myers again), with a nefarious plan to rule the world (natch), escapes into space in a rocket-powered Bob’s Big Boy statue, cryogenically frozen until he can return to bring the nations of the world to their knees, and Powers, the only man who can stop him, follows his foe into the deep freeze.
It’s when they re-emerge in 1997 America that Myers’ gift for inspired silliness shifts into high “gear.” Predictably, much of the movie hinges on the clash of hedonistic ’60s values and the age of AIDS, political correctness, and slightly less ludicrous fashion, a time where the carefree milieu of spy-flick escapism has given way to Tom Clancy snoreathons. It’s a source of satire with a little life left in it, but Myers wisely jets past the obvious culture-shock gags (attempting to play a CD on a turntable, inflatable sneakers blowing up in his face) and rushes headlong into absurdity, pushing every familiar set-up into new realms of the ridiculous. It’s all in the details – most screenwriters would have laid down the broad Bond-parody jokes (the femme fatale named Alotta Fagina, for instance) and let them lie, but only Myers would add twists of characterization like the Blofeld-like Dr. Evil’s attempts to reconcile with his Gen-X test-tube son (Seth Green) by attending father-son group therapy. Dr. Evil, in fact, puts Myers in the odd position of upstaging himself – Powers may have the archaic slang (what the hell does “shagadelic” mean?) and the repulsive way with the ladies (especially Elizabeth Hurley, as his modern-day assistant; I’m with Leno on this one – Hugh, what the hell were you thinking?), but the Doc has that way of lifting his pinky to his mouth in malevolent glee and even sings the Meow Mix song to his hairless cat.
This being a comedy, I’m loath to reveal too many jokes and set-ups (all of Wayne’s World‘s best jokes were already played out by the time it opened, you may recall), but lemme say that the funniest moments involve a blackjack table, some very strategically-choreographed near-nudity, and, to my shock and horror, a bathroom with Tom Arnold in the next stall. It’s also about fifteen minutes too long, which, for an ex-SNLer’s film, beats the average by about seventy. Mike Myers has returned (hey, wasn’t that the hook for all the Halloween movies?) and is working at the top of his form at last. So, c’mon, Mike, let’s see you use your newly-regained leverage and get Sprockets: Der Movie financed.
