July
26, 2002 | That insistent scratching noise you hear throughout Austin
Powers in Goldmember is the sound of filmmakers scraping the very
bottom of the barrel.
Some
of the movie's potty-mouthed humor is undeniably amusing, and a few
of the jokes that don't involve bodily functions are downright hilarious.
Even so, this second sequel to the fluky hit spoof Austin Powers:
International Man of Mystery plays less like a feature film and
more like a TV variety special of two or three decades ago. The stars
wander through and humiliate themselves to prove what good sports they
are. But there's flop sweat on their faces, and a desperate look in
their eyes. They're hell-bent on having a great time, maybe, but even
they suspect that the party is over.
In
the beginning, you may recall, there was 1997's International Man
of Mystery, created by Mike Myers of Wayne's World and Saturday
Night Live as a hand-tooled star vehicle for himself. The original
film, directed by Jay Roach, was intended as a spoof of '60s spy movies.
Or, perhaps, a spoof of '60s spy-movie spoofs. Or maybe a spoof of a
spoof of -- well, you get the idea. In any case, somewhere along the
line, things got out of hand. Cheesy, goofy and leeringly smutty, it
was only modestly successful in theaters - but popular enough on home
video to ensure a sequel.
Austin
Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999) was more of the same - actually,
a lot more of the same - with Mike Myers back as Austin, a cryogenically
preserved Swinging '60s superspy with unbridled libido and unsightly
teeth, and Dr. Evil, a singularly bad person bent on world domination.
The sequel proved to be enormously popular, especially with audiences
far too young to remember anything about the movies Myers spoofed in
the first episode. (Let's face it: Smutty silliness and slapstick, not
sharply focused satire, has always been the key to the Austin Powers
phenomenon.) It didn't hurt that Myers introduced two new characters
in Austin Powers 2: Fat Bastard, a hefty Scottish heavy played
(in a great deal of make-up) by Myers, and Mini-Me, a diminutive Dr.
Evil clone played by Verne Troyer. If you can't even read those names
without laughing out loud, well, take heart: They're back, along with
Austin and Dr. Evil, in the new episode.
For
Goldmember, Myers and co-screenwriter Michael McCullers had the
inspired idea to cast Michael Caine, a genuine icon of the Swinging
'60s era, as Austin's father, Nigel Powers, a still-swinging randy-dandy
with a bad hair-dye job (hey, you have to keep up appearances) and,
worse, teeth very much like his son's. Unfortunately, the filmmakers
don't do nearly enough with Nigel. And they do far too much with the
film's title character: A Dutch criminal mastermind - played, of course,
by Myers - with golden private parts (don't ask, you don't want to know)
and a rather disgusting skin condition.
Having
more or less exhausted the '60s as a source of comic inspiration, Myers
and director Roach take a time-tripping detour into the '70s, all the
better to introduce Foxxy Cleopatra, a walking and talking blaxploitation-movie
joke effectively played by Beyoncé Knowles (of the Destiny's
Child singing group). Even more than its two predecessors, however,
Goldmember essentially is plotless and aimless, coming off as
a loosely connected series of hit-or-miss episodes. The latest sequel
appears to have been improvised on a day-to-day basis during production.
And some days clearly were more productive than others.
The
filmmakers have the brazen chutzpah to recycle gags from the first two
movies, and then call attention to their recycling. Even Ozzy Osbourne
- a fleeting cameo player - isn't so brain-fried that he doesn't notice
the second-hand quality of the naughty bits. Now that is funny.
It's
hard to single out other elements of the film bits for praise or condemnation.
I strongly suspect you don't want graphic descriptions of the really
nasty stuff if you're reading this while eating. (Burning question of
the week: How did this movie get a PG-13 rating?) And the most uproarious
moments involve appearances by surprise guest stars. As Austin himself
might say: If I revealed their names too early, it would be a premature
climax, baby.
I'm
sorry. I'll behave.