I'm not sure how, but somehow I managed to miss the Austin Powers craze of the late 90's. I never went to see the flick, and then when it became a pop culture phenomenon, I didn't really feel like seeing it. Heck, since it was around everywhere and everyone thought they had an Austin Powers impersonation, I felt like I'd already seen it by extension. A few years ago, I managed to catch it on a bus trip, but I must've fallen asleep or was too busy talking because a lot of the movie felt unfamiliar. So this is a review from someone watching it in full for the first time a few days ago.
Which is a bit unfair to the film, since it was such a huge part of pop culture when it came out, there's no way to view it unbiasedly now. To use the horribly tired phrase, this movie is so 1997. Like the title hero (and his nemesis), it's practically frozen in time itself, and watching it brings you back to the horrible time when everyone was saying "shagadelic, baby", or "one million dollars". *shudder* So, jokes that may have made me laugh were I to have seen it when it first came out make me roll my eyes now. I've seen so many clips of this flick that the jokes are already old. But, the thing is, I'm not sure if they would've been that great anyway. Mike Myers' style is to push a joke two or three (or four or five) beats past it being funny, in the hope that the pushing of the joke itself will be funny. It's a knowing wink to the audience that has made him a very successful man, but got old with me around the time of Wayne's World.
In fact, pretty much all of Austin Powers' shtick got old for me very quickly. Like many films from Saturday Night Live, clever comedic premises (like the James Bond of the swinging-sixties parody) that would or have worked great in five minute segments fail to connect for a feature length film. The jokes are pretty obvious and juvenile, bodily humour jokes that I've never really enjoyed (well, not since making noises with my underarms stopped being the height of comedic genius). The parody of the film is clever, but the jokes fall flat.
Well, I should say that most of the jokes fall flat. While Austin Powers himself does little for me, I do find Myers other character in the film, Dr. Evil, to be quite funny most of the time. Dr. Evil saved the movie for me, I loved his out-dated plans for world conquest, I loved his interactions with his son Scott (Seth Green), and loved the scene where he and Scott go to group therapy. That all made me laugh, even though I knew of most of the scenes.
But, he wasn't funny enough for me to give the flick a passing grade. Again, who knows, if I had caught the movie back when it meant something, I may have thought more of it. But, that speaks to the staying power of the film, which is to say that there isn't much.
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