Austin Powers 2

AUSTIN POWERS: THE SPY WHO SHAGGED ME (1999)

Well, here's hoping this movie is as good as the first: I saw Austin Powers in a cheap second run theater where it was too hot and I was sleepy, and I didn't think much of the movie. However, six months later, when my roommates rented it on video, I thought it was hilarious. So I won't really know how good this particular film is for another six months or so, being as I saw it in a theater that was even cheaper, even hotter and I was even more tired. Until that time though, some thoughts:

The scene hog and his laugh track No matter how many interesting interviews I see with Mike Myers, no matter how insightful and incisive he seems, whenever I see him in a movie, the same thing pretty much comes to mind: Mike Myers is a hammy scene-stealing egotist with either the worst self-esteem or the most heightened megalomania of anyone I've ever seen. I also think his comedy writing borders on OCD, where he must repeat the same jokes over and over, far past the point of funniness. Only the almost superhuman levels of joy that emanate out of him while performing prevent him from being insufferable. But everything that comes with it really tires me mightily; how many actresses are going to take the role of laugh track with tits, for example, that have the occasional zinger but mainly exist in the movie to laugh at anything a Mike Myers characters does? Heather Graham is a pretty good actress, I think, and yet she doesn't do nearly as well in her role as Elizabeth Hurley did in the first movie, a paradox I can't quite figure out since Elizabeth Hurley can barely act. (Also, here's a strange conundrum: from the time Heather Graham appeared in Twin Peaks back in 1991 to the time she popped up in Swingers in 1996, she appeared to not age a day. From Swingers to Austin Powers 2, she looks like she's aged ten years in three. Why is that?)

Admittedly, Myers as Dr. Evil is hilarious, and I actually liked the Mini-Me sections of the movie, which is surprising since midget humor has never really been my thing. The Austin Powers scenes are pretty wearying, though, and I have no idea why Myers obviously spent hours and hours putting on a fat suit so he could play Fat Bastard, Dr. Evil's henchman for all of ten minutes. My theory is that when he wrote Austin Powers 2, he couldn't come up with anything funny and so he fell back on the Scotsman jokes that were so hilarious in So I Married an Axe Murderer. Fortunately, a lot of funny stuff came up in the course of shooting. Interestingly enough, most of the funny stuff is in the Dr. Evil section, probably because there's so many Myers as Dr. Evil: admittedly hilarious people in the cast in that section for Myers to work with. I think Myers is one of those guys who will do anything it takes to make the people around him laugh (having ridden in an elevator once with him I can sort of attest to this) so the more people around him and the funnier they are, the harder he works. However, get him in a scene where there are very few people, and they're not particularly amusing, and watch the slacker angle kick in. Since I secretly suspect Myers of being an attention hog (based on the stories of the Wayne's World 2 draft where he pointedly left out the Garth character), it pretty much dooms him to get less and less funny the more successful and the more powerful he gets.

Rob Lowe, comic genius? So yeah, there you have it. Probably better ways to spend your money or your time, at least until the video comes out, in which case you might find the whole thing hilarious. Bonus points, by the way, to Rob Lowe for doing a dead-on Robert Wagner impersonation. Really pretty impressive if you think about it. If anyone had told me back in 1984 when I walking out of St. Elmo's Fire that Rob Lowe would actually crack me up intentionally, I would have heckled them mercilessly. There's some truism about the nature of comedy in there, somewhere.

More About This Movie