There's no searching for coherence in the raucous and rowdy AustinPowers: The Spy Who Shagged Me no plot worth revealing, no attempt tomake any sense. Laughs are all this film cares about, and it's wickedlyunconcerned about how it gets them.More energetic and funnier than its predecessor, the considerablevideo hit AustinPowers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, this edition ofAustinania is an Airplane!-type cornucopia of spoof humor that takesgleeful potshots at a wide range of pop culture targets. It doesn'tconnect every time--there's no way it could--but its batting average isgratifyingly high.
Once again directed by Jay Roach and written by star Mike Myers(helped this time by co-writer Michael McCullers), AustinPowers: The Spy Who Shagged Me relates the further adventures of the delusional secret agent and hisequally incompetent nemesis, the shiny-suited, bald master of mayhem, Dr.Evil.
Both men were cryogenically frozen in the swinging 1960s only to bethawed out in the go-go '90s to face off in International Man ofMystery. In this latest chapter of what will no doubt be a continuingsaga, the two men go back in time to duke it out once more in those wildand crazy '60s.
The thin reed of a plot on which considerable madness is balanced isthat Dr. Evil has concocted a plan to steal Austin's libido, known as hismojo. Waiting in the '60s to help the doctor is Young Number Two (RobLowe, doing a good imitation of Robert Wagner, the original Number Two)and waiting to bewitch Austin is agent Felicity Shagwell (don't ask),played with the correct amount of bemusement and attractiveness byHeather Graham.
Also new to Austin's world is the tiny, one-eighth-sized miniatureclone of Dr. Evil (played by 2-foot, 8-inch Verne Troyer) that the greatman dubs Mini-Me and immediately involves in all manner of surrealshenanigans.
AustinPowers: The Spy Who Shagged Me throws so many kinds of things at you sofast, watching it can be pleasantly disorienting. If the film wants tohave Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello appear out of nowhere to sing"I'll Never Fall in Love Again" on the streets of London, they're there.For those who've never experienced an Austin movie, here are some otherideas of what to expect:
* Inane sexual humor. This includes a character named Ivana Humpalot(she's Russian, if you must know), an elaborately edited sequenceinvoking nicknames for the male sexual organ that features both WillieNelson and Woody Harrelson, and lines of dialogue like a woman askingAustin if he smoked after sex and the rascal responding, "I don't know,baby, I've never looked."
* Toilet humor. Literally and a lot of it. With key sequencesinvolving bowel movements and an odoriferous stool sample, anyone oldenough to get into an R-rated movie will be hard-pressed to find thisamusing.
* Yiddish-tinged humor. As in the first film, there's a country namedKreplachistan and a key character named Frau Farbissina (Yiddish forembittered), making clear that Myers' heart is in the Catskills, not theHighlands.
* Movie references and spoofs. Given that Austin himself is a spoof ofJames Bond, it's not surprising that numerous other films get parodied,including Star Wars, The Exorcist, Jerry Maguire and The Island ofDr. Moreau. The references are dead-on but so fleeting it's possible tomiss them if you're not paying attention.
Hard to miss is AustinPowers: The Spy Who Shagged Me infatuation with The JerrySpringer Show. In a mock episode titled My Father Is Evil and Wants toTake Over the World, Dr. Evil's disaffected son Scott (Seth Green)confronts the old man and gets to hear himself dissed as "the mayonnaise,the Diet Coke of evil."
With humor like this all over the place, AustinPowers: The Spy Who Shagged Mecouldn't succeed without a unifying force, and that has to be the proteanMyers, who in addition to playing both Austin and Dr. Evil spent nearlyfive hours per session climbing into a Stan Winston-designed latex suitto play a heavyweight villain with a 70-inch waistline subtly named FatBastard.
As these films and his earlier Wayne's World demonstrate, Myers hasa singular talent for skit humor. Seeing him play both the sniggering,snaggletoothed Austin, "the man who put the grr in swinger," and thefussy, pinky-waving Dr. Evil is to see a gifted performer who knows hisstrengths and is not afraid of playing to them. You can get away with anawful lot of gross, juvenile humor if you've got that to fall back on.