Austin Powers

AUSTIN POWERS
By Tom Soter
from MOVIE TIMES

It’s shagadelic, man.

Austin Powers, the international man of mystery, the secret agent who out-spoofed James Bond and snagged a boffo box office, will return on June 11 in The Spy Who Shagged Me. As he did in the initial entry, Mike Myers plays both Powers, the hip spy with the bad teeth and groovy sixties outlook, and Dr. Evil, the bald-headed nemesis who spent seven years in “evil medical school” (and was inspired by 007 bad guy Ernst Stavro Blofeld).

The first movie, a surprising success, tapped into a young audience’s fascination with the psychedelic sixties and sight gags and an older audience’s nostalgia for that Bondian age. Although Powers is no super-spy in the Sean Connery style he captures a key quality of Connery’s Bond: self-mockery. Powers is a super-schmiel, a kind of Maxwell Smart-Inspector Clouseau-007 hybrid, whose appeal is in his outlandish, unknowing nerdiness. He is a suave schnook. And the Powers movies hark back to that Bond super-parody, Casino Royale: short comic bits and gags that depend a great deal on the audience’s knowledge of spy movie cliches.

The plot for Spy Who Shagged Me could come right out of The Avengers (the TV show, not the movie): Dr. Evil returns to 1969 after stealing Austin Power's “mojo,” the the life force of every secret agent. The result: Powers can't make it with the chicks. The superspy and new squeeze Felicity Shagwell (Heather Graham) zoom back in time to battle Evil and retrieve the mojo.

Like the first movie, 007-style puns predominate (Kristen Johnson plays Ivana Humpalot), along with celebrity guest shots (Burt Bacharach, Elvis Costello, Willie Nelson). The movie also features the same endearingly silly dialogue (“I shagged her. I shagged her rotten, baybeee”) and visual homages to sixties pop chic.

Will the flick make a billion zillion dollars? Do you need to ask? Yeah, baby! Groovy!