# Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999)

### reviewed by
Bob Bloom

Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999) 2 stars out of 4. Starring Mike Myers, Mike Myers, Mike Myers, Heather Graham and Michael York.

Austin Powers is back, bad teeth, elephantine libido and all. And like in the original, Mike Myers has stretched a one-joke premise to the breaking point.

"Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me" is more of a series of sketches and shtick, rather than a cohesive, follow-the-plot feature.

I mean, how can it be anything else considering Myers' free-flow imagination.

No, what "The Spy Who Shagged Me" is really is a Valentine to the 1960s and the spy melodramas that proliferated during that era. The super-stud, super-agents such as Bond and Flint who could kill a man with one hand while caressing a woman with the other.

Those who loved the first Austin Powers movie will undoubtedly enjoy this sequel, which is basically more of the same. Those who felt the original movie was stupid and childish are advised that they are taking their chances here.

For like the original, the humor in "The Spy Who Shagged Me" is that kind of juvenile, smuttiness, double-entendre jokiness we all thought was so cool in junior high school.

The premise of "The Spy Who Shagged Me" is quite simple. Austin Powers' nemesis, Dr. Evil (also Myers), travels back to 1969 and steals Powers' mojo - his libidinous life force. The theft doesn't seem to incapacitate our hero, or even slow him down. It merely keeps him from bedding luscious CIA agent Felicity Shagwell (Heather Graham), while Dr. Evil tries to carry out his nefarious plan to extort millions from the nations of the world.

The movie does have some funny bits: Dr. Evil trying to reconcile with his estranged son, Scott, on "The Jerry Springer Show"; a romantic sidewalk interlude during which Austin and Felicity dance to "I'll Never Fall in Love Again," as played by Burt Bacharach and sung by Elvis Costello; and most of all two very well-edited sequences in which people around the world see Dr. Evil's spaceship - which has a very distinctive shape - and continually use phallic euphemisms and slang to call attention to it.

Graham is deliciously funny as Shagwell, entering the spirit of the enterprise with a twinkle in her eyes and a smile on her lips.

Myers, of course, is becoming a master at the knowing nod, the mischievous pause that lets the audience know that he, too, is in on the joke, whether he is portraying Austin Powers or Dr. Evil.

However most of the tomfoolery that comes between the sequences seems like empty filler.

Even the introduction of some new characters, including Mini-Me, a diminutive double of Dr. Evil, and Fat Bastard, a one-ton slovenly killer Scot, also portrayed by Myers, cannot cover the cracks in silly going-ons.

Myers and co-screenwriter Michael McCullers constantly walk the edge of bad taste, but skirt it with a wink and a smile.

"The Spy Who Shagged Me," honestly, is a movie no one in their right mind can take seriously. It is a spoof, a parody, but its flaw is that it continually meanders around trying to cram in too many affectionate riffs about the 1960s.

A little more discipline and a lot less scatology and sex jokes would have made for a better - and funnier - picture.

Bob Bloom is the film critic at the Journal and Courier in Lafayette, IN. He can be reached by e-mail at bloom@journal-courier.com or at cbloom@iquest.net

The review above was posted to the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due to ASCII to HTML conversion.

Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews