Austin Powers: The Spy who Shagged Me (1999, PG-13)

Directed by M. Jay Roach

Written by Mike Myers and Michael McCullers

Starring Mike Myers, Heather Graham, Robert Wagner, Rob Lowe, Seth Green, Mindy Sterling, Verne Troyer

As Reviewed by James Brundage

I did an article the week before this came out defending parody movies. In retrospect, I believe I should have picked another time to defend them. Austin Powers: The Spy who Shagged Me, a thoroughly ridiculous film, falls victim to the curse of comedies everywhere: the plot becomes a vehicle for the jokes.

Early on in the movie, as Austin Powers (Mike Myers) is about to travel back in time in order to thwart the plans of Dr. Evil (also Mike Myers), he unearths a major plothole in the movie and tries to bring it up to a Q-like figure in the movie. This person playfully intones. "I suggest you don't worry about things like that." Then he turns to the audience and says. "That goes for you, too." This kind of laissez-faire attitude towards the plot is carried on throughout the remainder of the film. Every plot hole is ignored, every glitch bypassed with a trite device, and every sense of plot direction lost.

For this reason, telling you the plot of the movie is a moot point, considering that the entire plot doesn't matter at all in relation to the jokes. The jokes just pop up out of nowhere. Some of them are funny, some of them aren't. The majority of them just basically take up time.

A higher percentage of the jokes are funnier than in the first Austin Powers, but this one has the same tiring, trite humor that James Bond can pull off but Austin Powers can't. It has a genius sequence describing a rather... odd shaped spaceship, a fine part in which "The Jerry Springer Show" is rather effectively parodied, and a continuation of the highly demented psychodrama that makes up the relationship between Scott Evil (Seth Green of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" fame) and Dr. Evil, but the film in and of itself remains nothing but a vehicle for these jokes to travel in.

Because these jokes seem just stuck in, you never really get into the characters (Heather Graham's Felicity Shagwell being the exception, but I have a thing for that actress and have had a thing for her since Drugstore Cowboy), so, when the jokes are made, you don't really laugh as much as you normally would. If fact, you don't really laugh much at all. It's more of a chuckle film.

In the effort to fit in so many good jokes, the film drags its feet like a man on the night before his wedding. It really doesn't want to go. Add to this list of things that this film lacks: Inertia. Other things that it also lacks are characters, good actors, true intelligence, and the special zing that makes a parody film worthwhile.

I'm not going to turn around and bash parody films, as I'm sure everyone else who is giving Austin Powers: The Spy who Shagged Me the lackluster reviews it deserves will be doing. Instead, I make the suggestion that this film would be much, much better as a stand-up comedy sketch. In a stand up sketch, you don't really need plot, only direction and a target, both of which Austin Powers have in abundance. Myers, an SNL veteran and a fine stand up comedian, would have done fine with that... but no. Instead, I had to sit through 95 minutes of good jokes stuck in a very, very bad movie.