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.
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.