Rumble in the urban jungle (3/20/02)
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After making a dramatic entrance into the lair of Doctor Evil, Michael Caine, in character as Nigel, founder of the Powers dynasty of International Men of Mystery, directs the first two minions to assault him where to stand so that he may more easily dispose of each with a single punch, and then addresses the third: “Do you know who I am? Have you any idea how many anonymous henchmen I’ve killed over the years? — Look at you! You haven’t even got a nametag! [Encouraging:] You’ve got no chance; why don’t you just fall down?” — And, completely psyched out, the third henchman obliges.
— a paragraph which obviously belongs somewhere below, and must accordingly have been sucked through a wormhole and deposited here at the beginning; possibly to illustrate the paradoxes of time travel. Or is this just an attempt to find an excuse to give away the best gag in the movie at the outset and go home? — But no such luck:
Austin Powers in Goldmember. [Jay Roach, 2002.]
When the temporarily incarcerated but eternally nefarious Doctor Evil works a dastardly revenge from behind prison walls and arranges the kidnapping of our hero’s playboy-spy father Michael Caine (truly excellent casting: “I
invented Austin Powers,” says Caine, and indeed I think he did) and his spiriting-away via temporal vortex to the Seventies, the Man with the Mod Jacket must don fur cape and platform shoes and hurtle back to the Age of Disco in a time-travelling pimpmobile to rescue his inattentive parent from the clutches of — well, at first glance from the clutches of a bevy of disco babes, but by implication from the keeper of this honeyed snare, the criminal mastermind Johann van der Smut aka Goldmember aka (guess what) Mike Myers, a rotaryjointed buffon (maybe the point was that his ass screws on backwards, but my mind was wandering) on rollerskates with some mutant variety of eczema that entails many silly jokes about flaky skin, a dorky Dutch accent (“Hey everybody...I am from
Holland; isn’t that weird?”)(uh-huh), and a set of glowing artificial golden genitalia which replaced the originals after an unfortunate metallurgical experiment went awry. (This certainly suggests a new category of Snap-On Tools calendar, but never mind that now.) The pursuit once joined, Powers acquires as the indispensable bombshell sidekick Beyoncé Knowles, in character as Fox(x)y Cleopatra (“Up yours, jive turkey!”) — not exactly young Pam Grier, but close enough to cause me to adjust my pants — with whom he chases the several villains and the errant father-figure through a labyrinth of boob fart weenie skidmark subtitle silhouette and talent agent jokes and belabored references to previous blockbusters to the unravelling of the central mystery, which has something to do (don’t ask me what) with the ongoing parodic psychodrama involving Powers, Evil, Caine, and their various clones and dependents — and to the final defeat of a scheme to destroy all life on Earth as well, though of course this absorbs no more of your attention than the period at the end of the sentence.
The jokes are mainly too dumb to repeat (twin Japanese schoolgirls named Fook Mi and Fook Yu, a master plan to melt the Arctic icecap called Preparation H, etc., etc.), but there are a couple of moments which seem to suggest political commentary — the scene in which Mini-Me moons the World Court seems like a sly reference to the best political cartoon of the 2000 presidential campaign (a depiction of Bush the Elder and Bush the Younger as wicked doctor and evil midget clone), and there are occasional flashes of what might be absurdist parody of Texan xenophobia (“There are only two things I can’t stand in this world,” says Caine, “people who are intolerant of other people’s cultures — and the Dutch!”) — and several elaborately-choreographed and very entertaining dance numbers — not simply the predictable Disco Inferno, but also, e.g., a cellblock-rap video starring Doctor Evil and Mini-Me, and the opening sequence itself, whose conclusion establishes what many of us had already suspected — namely, that Britney Spears is an android and that Mike Myers is a better dancer than she is. (Let alone Myers’ remarkably athletic dramatic chorus.)
On the other hand the product placements are so intrusive and continuous as to make one wonder whether the feature-length commercial is really that far off, and, though the cameos by Cruise, Paltrow, Spacey, De Vito, Spielberg, Travolta, et al. are clever and amusing, they only provide more evidence that at this point nearly everyone can do these characters better than their author can himself: when Myers is only the third-best Austin Powers in his own movie, it might behoove him (oh behoove) to hang it up and move on. But then I’m not cashing the checks.
____________The revolution will not be televised (2/12/02)
