Austin Powers : International Man Of Mystery (1997)
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Comedy films are often difficult to analyse - they’re either funny or they’re not and there’s not much more that can be said about them. There are occasional films that despite being comedies manage to be more than a collection of jokes and humorous situations (see “Galaxy Quest”, for example) but none of the Austin Powers films fall into that category. As a comedy film it is, however, reasonably amusing.
The premise is that 1960's superspy Austin Powers (Mike Myers) has been frozen in time and wakes up in the 1990's where he has to confront his arch-nemesis : the evil genius Dr Evil (again, Mike Myers). British secret agent Vanessa (Elizabeth Hurley) helps him out while Dr. Evil is hindered by a number of incompetent sidekicks including henchman Number Two (Robert Wagner) and his son Scott Evil (Seth Green) who disappoints his father by not wanting to follow in his evil footsteps.
There isn’t really much more to the plot than the above, save for assorted scenes and concepts which gently spoof just about every spy movie ever made, particularly the Bond films. The other main source of jokes is the contrast between Austin’s 1960s habits and the 1990's way of life with Powers quickly finding himself hopelessly out of date.
The key thing with any comedy movie is how many good jokes it produces, and this film delivers a fair number of decent laughs although a high proportion of the jokes here simply aren’t funny. The humour never gets far beyond obvious gags and simple parody and while it is amusing enough to be worth watching it’s not really a classic movie by any stretch of the imagination.
One problem is that Powers’ character is frequently rather irritating and the film’s best moment mostly seem to occur when Dr. Evil takes centre stage. Powers is merely a dumb parody of a movie spy and while Dr Evil is no less generic he is far more entertaining.
In summary, amusing at times but apart from there’s not much to say about this film.
Rating : 7 / 10
All content ©2003 William Marnoch.
Comments? Agree/Disagree with the Reviews? Suggestions? Random Ramblings? Whatever you might want to say, feel free to e-mail me at william@wmarnoch.freeserve.co.uk .