In a silly pun better than any Austin could manage, one might say that the very idea buggers belief.
Having lasted only about 15 minutes of the first Austin Powers movie before falling asleep, I can’t do much in the way of comparison with that hit — or its sequel, which I avoided like a bush full of pubic lice. Clearly, though, the formula is as before. Sixties superspy Austin Powers (Mike Myers), unaccountably given to wearing velvet jackets and frilly shirts even in the new century, is required to save the world from the machinations of a super-criminal, Dr Evil (Myers again) and his associates. Among them is the wicked Dutch scientist Goldmember (Myers yet again), who has solid gold genitalia and is, quite bafflingly, the butt of a long sequence of Dutch jokes. Are the Dutch the new Poles? The new Irish? Have I missed something in the secret global currents of xenophobic humour?
The whole idea is, of course, a silly parody of the James Bond movies, which are already self-parodic (though they became a tad more serious once Roger Moore went into well-deserved retirement). And it’s not as though we’re short of James Bond rip-offs in the form of the upcoming XXX or the Mission: Impossible franchise.
Goldmember (which is to say Austin Powers III) is aware of this, and its funniest moments are near the opening credits, when it sends up Mission: Impossible. But it really has nothing to add to the genre of comic parody. There doesn’t seem to be a joke in it that one hasn’t heard before, or could at least have predicted. The humour is so schoolboy in its relentless focus on the nether regions (and I don’t mean the feet) that it makes Beavis and Butt-Head, with their hard-on fixation, look like sophisticates out of Noël Coward.
As Austin Powers, Myers gurns and grimaces, and gurns and grimaces some more. When he’s playing Dr Evil, he displays the kind of camply mincing demeanour that only heterosexual men whose ideas of gay men is stuck in the Fifties find amusing. Maybe I’ve just lost my sense of humour; there was one audience member (oh, behave!) who was trying so hard to laugh I thought he’d give himself a hernia.
Presumably there’s something funny in the fruity and utterly unattractive Powers being such a babe-magnet, but it certainly didn’t work for me, unless it was meant to be self-evidently preposterous. Woody Allen, even in his diminutive 60s, is a more convincing sex symbol.
Michael Caine plays Austin’s dad in a role very sensibly turned down by Sean Connery. Caine, at least, is a classy presence, though he is given little to do other than act like all the other idiots in the movie. Austin Powers is not, in fact, a parody of James Bond; he is actually the reincarnation of Benny Hill.