Get with the Times

Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997), Directed by Jay Roach

By Christina Harlin, your Fearless Young Orphan

It has taken us a good long while to get around to Austin Powers in our “Spy Films” category, but we’re not on a strict schedule here, so sue me. I have meant to do this and simply never gotten around to it, even knowing that Austin belonged here. Back when I was watching the rather excellent “Flint” films and the revolting Matt Helm films, I even brought up the Austin Powers comparisons. This is because, while Austin Powers makes fun of James Bond villainy – Dr. Evil being the perfect amalgamate of every terrible Bond nemesis – Austin himself is a mix of Flint and Helm, and a fair measure of the ultra-hip protagonist of the classic film Blowup, which has damn little to do with spies at all. Austin is not James Bond. If you want to see a spoof of Bond himself, watch the overall excellent French OSS-117 comedies, or any of the Roger Moore Bond movies, come to think of it.

Now let’s see here. It’s been twenty years since Austin danced onto the scene, which brings up a couple of vital questions at once. Did the movie age well? Does the passage of real time cause I don’t smoke, but I couldn’t turn down an problems for a movie that is, in large part, offer with this much effort in it. about the passage of time? The joke is that Austin (Mike Myers) is a 1967 playboy-rockstar-photographer-superspy- freeloving-hippie-mojo-wielding sex machine who has been cryogenically frozen and reanimated in 1997 to save the world from the similarly transported Dr. Evil (also Mike Myers), who is menacing the world with “lasers” and such. And in 1997, all the things that made Austin cool have been seriously hindered: uninhibited sex is scary, drugs are bad, women don’t like being called “baby”, etc. etc. Oh my, what’s a swinging sex god supposed to do?

Well, since he’s saddled with the boring, uptight, though admittedly beautiful sidekick Vanessa Kensington (Elizabeth Hurley, contributing little more than her flawless face), his goal becomes impressing her enough to bag her, though I have to say that her being the daughter of his “one that got away,” Mrs. Kensington (Mimi Rogers) adds a level of creepiness to the story that I think we must ignore. We also must ignore what happens immediately in the sequel, which disposes quickly of Vanessa’s overbearing tedium and never mentions Mrs. Kensington again, which would be a major problem if not for the fact that this is a comedy series so we have to let things like that slide.

But now here were are, over twenty years later in 2018, and I’m not sure Austin’s comedy has aged well – or maybe I haven’t aged well? All the things that might have seemed funny in 1997 – like, oh no, nobody dares have unprotected sex anymore! – have become sort of sad and obvious. In the current atmosphere, a whole new sexual revolution of a completely different sort, this kind of spoofing is making commentary that we weren’t even aware of in 1997. Or, maybe I should say, we were aware of it, but nobody was saying it out loud or, if they were, nobody was listening. Austin is meant to be spoofing the repulsive character of Matt Helm, not emulating him.

“Why get so serious about it?” you might ask, but you know, one cannot help but watch a film in its present context. It is perfectly possible to be able to see a film as it was intended, and then also to question those intentions. “Oh for God’s

Austin at his best, infecting the world with sake, it was just a comedy,” you say. groovy dancing. Yeah, we’re getting pretty serious here, for the sake of old Austin Powers. This is just your Fearless Young Orphan, telling you that if you haven’t seen Austin in the last decade or so, you might be surprised at how the character overloads your endurance. He gets irritating fast, the sex jokes are stale and sometimes quite uncomfortable. All those lines that everybody quoted for years afterward: “Oh, behave!” “Do I make you horny, baby?” and so on, seem more than a little pathetic.

Austin is a far better character when he’s breezing through life seeing everything as “groovy” and the whole world as a beautiful chance to have fun, than he is when trying to acclimate himself to a snoozeworthy monogamous relationship. In point of fact, Austin delivers a marvelous little monologue near the end of the film, when he explains to Dr. Evil the real purpose behind the sexual revolution of the 60s. The moment is handled so deftly, so sincerely, that you might think you’re watching a different film: suddenly Austin Powers has wisdom and dignity. Even Dr. Evil’s snide, “There’s nothing sadder than an aging hipster” can’t undo this one. On that note, let’s stop whining about Austin’s tiresome sex-crazed nonsense and look at Dr. Evil, who is the real source of enduring comedy in the movie.

Dr. Evil’s running joke is that his own brand of SPECTRE-based evil has been left behind, replaced by corporate greed and our destruction of the planet by simply living on it carelessly, and this actually stays fresh because people still, twenty years later, aren’t really getting it. Dr. Evil wants trap doors, fire pits, wicked themed minions, a doleful pussycat in his lap, a chance to coldly tell his tragic backstory, and he wants laser-sharks, even though the ASPCA won’t let him have them anymore. Dr. Evil is simply a great riff on every nonsense villain a movie ever had and it seems that no villainous trope is left unscathed, from the evil laughter, the evil board meetings, the evil plans to hold the world hostage, the evil unnecessarily –complicated killing machines, and the evil refusal to outright kill a nemesis unless the method has some evil goddamn flair. You’ll never be able to take Ernst Blofeld seriously again, assuming you ever could in the first place.

Myers is a charming comic actor, and a pretty damn good comic writer, meaning that if you take the film without overanalyzing it like a crazy Fearless Young Orphan, Austin Powers hits about 60% of the time. The whole thing could have been played more intelligently. For example, did the movie need to stop and explain to us that gorgeous henchwoman Alotta Fagina’s name was a joke? And that Austin found it to be an odd name? Did he think we wouldn’t get it? Did we need Tom Arnold in a bathroom stall, giving constant verbal commentary about his perceptions of the

You simply cannot call yourself a supervillain without an underground lair. sounds Austin is making in the next stall over? Silence on his part would have been funnier and I still feel like the movie is underestimating our ability to understand. How long do they have to go on about the Irish Henchman’s “lucky charms”? We get it, for Chrissakes, move on.

Yet for every overextended and over-explained dud, there is a great one-liner or a dead-on riff, and I have recommended films for fewer laughs than that. I’m sorry the movie as a whole didn’t age better because it does have a number of things to really enjoy. Also in the works: great costumes, cool sets (especially in 1967 London), cameos by movie stars (including Carrie Fisher as a group therapist, bet you’d forgotten about that!) and a fun soundtrack. Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery is not a film about espionage or even our perceptions of it, but of our perceptions of movies’ perceptions of it, and that is when it’s at its best.