Wayne's World 2 (1993)

Director: Stephen Surjik

Cast: Mike Myers, Dana Carvey, Christopher Walken, Tia Carrere

Have I Seen It Before: Oh, sure.

Did I Like It: As I watch it this time, it didn’t work for me as much as it had in years past.

For years, I would have sworn by the fact that this is just as good as <Wayne’s World (1992)>. When Carvey has spent the last several decades insisting he wasn’t very good in the film, I blanched. When there was never a Wayne’s World 3, I always shook my head. We got three (and a perpetually fourth threatened) Austin Powers films, but we were only left with this? The kung-fu dubbing was (and still is) pretty great. The joke about the sweet shop owner works on me every time.

And that’s kind of the problem. I didn’t need to be told that Myers went off and wrote a completely different version of the movie—one in which Wayne (Myers) and Garth (Carvey) secede from the United State and form their own nation*—that was well into production before Paramount scuttled it as no one had bothered to get the rights to adapt the source material.

So we’re left with this. A couple of amusing bits, but the whole thing reeks of a single all-night writing session where the eventual answer was to dust off a bunch of sketches that never made it past the Friday Night slaughter.

I guess I’ve truly grown up. I only like the first Wayne’s World now. I’ll studiously avoid re-watching that one for a while. I’m not sure what I might do if that film doesn’t hit the same anymore.

*A comic concept that, if not original in its own right, would have certainly been strange for a movie based on an SNL sketch. Just imagine the Blues Brothers trying that. Ok, I could imagine that. Imagine the guys from A Night at the Roxbury (1998). Actually, that’s pretty funny, too. Why hasn’t this come to pass yet? At any rate I can still imagine the downside being that the idiots of the here and now would have taken some supremely stupid inspiration from that.

Wayne’s World (1992)

Director: Penelope Spheeris

Cast: Mike Myers, Dana Carvey, Rob Lowe, Tia Carrere

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, please. Or perhaps I should say “Schya?” (which the new Blu-Ray steelbook tells me is the proper spelling)  I find it highly unlikely that someone could get through their childhood in the 90s and not catch this one. I’m probably more familiar with “Bohemian Rhapsody” from this than anything else…

Did I Like It: The film is funny, which is more than can be said for really any of the SNL-based feature films (yes, I’m including you,  The Blues Brothers (1980)), and it is far weirder than any film based on a recurring comedy sketch has any right to be. That weirdness, too, doesn’t limit it from authentically and affectionately depicting that unique, guileless aimlessness in your 20s which can be bought out entirely for $5000.

We could talk about all of that, but it’s obvious. There’s nothing new to be added to any of those points. Do you want to know where this movie rises above even movies occupying similar types of characters like Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) or Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)?

It’s in a dismantling of toxic masculinity that the film rises above its peers. Yes, its heroes are governed by a shallowness concerning the opposite sex, are dominated by a need for immediate gratification (does licorice go bad if you replace the rear view mirror of your car with a dispenser?), and are more interested in what people like than what they are like. But where other characters are usually terrified by nothing more than the implication of a man telling them they love them.

And yet here, there is no terror when Terry (Lee Tergesen) continuously tells characters he loves the. There’s just an awkwardness at the slightest acknowledgement of any real emotion between people. But in the end (albeit the mega-happy ending), that is all dispensed with to make everyone better people than they were at the beginning, even if it is in service of a joke.

Austin Powers in Goldmember (2002)

Director: Jay Roach

Cast: Mike Myers, Beyoncé Knowles, Michael Caine, Seth Green

Have I Seen It Before?: More on that in a minute.

Did I like it?: Well, here we are again. The only thing that this movie has going for it is a sense of finality, trying to change the characters (sketches, really) enough that if the series were to continue things would never be the same.

But nothing in the films matters, so much so that it is impossible for jokes or gags to exist long enough to make us laugh.

The world is making an Austin Powers movie, complete with celebrity cameos, but the thought is quickly abandoned until the very end, just to fit one more celebrity cameo.

Dr. Evil hatches a plot, and it is forgotten almost as quickly.

A new villain, Goldmember (Myers) is introduced, and has shockingly little to do with the proceedings other than to be weirdly Swedish and eat his own skin.

A new love interest for Powers is introduced in the form of Foxxy Cleopatra (Knowles) and…

Well, she is the best part of the film, somehow managing to look not embarrassed by the proceedings, which should have automatically qualified her for some sort of special Academy Award.

Number Three (Fred Savage, peeking his head out of his grown-up actor retirement for just long enough to send him back to television directing) has a mole. That’s the whole joke. It is, thankfully, quickly forgotten.

Austin has something that might resemble an arc with his father, Nigel (Caine), but it never goes anywhere other than a needless revelation that Powers and Dr. Evil are actually brothers.

All of these notions are introduced and abandoned with the same level of energy that they could certainly put everything back the way they found it for a fourth film, and no one would care. If the world hadn’t moved on from yelling “Yeah, Baby!” to everyone they meet (just in time to start yelling “Why so Serious?” at everyone they meet), we might have had to sit through such a fourth film.

Which brings me to a forthright plea. So, please, Mr. Myers. Do not go back to this well. You’ve had a good run since then, and I’m not talking about the various Shreks or Gurus Love you might wander into. You’re a documentarian, with Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon (2013), and a book, Canada. You were even in Inglourious Basterds (2009). You don’t need Austin Powers. We don’t need Austin Powers.

Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999)

Director: Jay Roach

Cast: Mike Myers, Heather Graham, Verne Troyer, Seth Green

Have I Seen It Before?: Yeah… Guys, it was the 90s. We didn’t know any better.

Did I like it?: The better question becomes, did I even like it way-back-when? The loving ribbing of early Bond films that was the entire rationale for the first film, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997), to exist is largely gone. Although I now realize—having re-watched all three films in a row—that there is plenty left to drain from that tub. And here, the early days of Connery (and Lazenby, judging by Austin’s outfit) are abandoned for a lunar plot so inane that it makes Moonraker (1979) and the other Roger Moore movies look like John le Carré novels.

Maybe its unfair to criticize the plot of a movie that hinges on the hero accidentally drinking the bowel movement of one of the villain’s henchmen, but I maintain that is the case in point. The one gag of the original film that I can honestly say still works involves the villains trying to come up with the plot by which they might hold the world ransom. Hitting any number of walls, they shrug and decide to capture a nuclear weapon. Never has there been a more direct hit on the lazier aspects of the Bond films from which it stems. Here, there is nothing. It’s as if, in place of actually writing, a market research report took the knowledge that these films appeal to teenage boys, and subsequently abandoned everything that might have worked about its freshman effort.

And now that I think about, I was nearly 15 when came out. I guess I need to confess that it did work for me at the time. But the boy that this film did work for is a complete stranger to me.

Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997)

Director: Jay Roach

Cast: Mike Myers, Elizabeth Hurley, Michael York, Mimi Rogers

Have I Seen It Before?: I was 12, going on 13 when the movie came out. If there was anyone for whom it was made, it was I.

Did I like it?: We all remember for about half an hour twenty years ago, we all latched on to the notion of the Austin Powers. Not because he was terribly funny, not because his throwback to a simpler age appealed to us, but mainly because he was a Gollum of catchphrases that we all could sort of do an impression of. Time passed, probably a mixture of 9/11 and Austin Powers in Goldmember (2002) happened, and we all moved on.

But as I continue my willy nilly re-watch of the Bond films (I will eventually force myself to watch Moonraker (1979) again, I swear), I thought it might be time to give Austin and company another shot. The first one had to be somewhat good, right?

Eh.

There is a slavish devotion to the work of directors Guy Hamilton, Terrence Young and Lewis Gilbert, along with the delightful production design of Ken Adam and the brassy sounds of John Barry, but there’s not a lot of wit in those references. It is merely showing us things that we might recognize from other films, in hopes that it might elicit something resembling a laugh from the audience. This feels like the intermediate infection point between the sublime joy of films like Airplane (1980) and The Naked Gun: From The Files of Police Squad! (1988) and the witless pains of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer. Tragically this film seems just as interested as lovingly referencing the early Bond films as it is in adopting an affect more akin to Casino Royale (1967).

Please, don’t make me re-watch the first Casino Royale feature. I beg of you.

And the humor that is on display here isn’t much to write home about. It aims at the lowest common denominator, and while that may make this reviewer read as stuffier than he might hope, I can only offer this in my defense: I remember laughing so hard in the 1990s that I hit my head at the sequence in the bathroom with Tom Arnold when Austin (Myers*) screams at a henchman, “Who does Number Two work for?” Today? Nearly nothing. I didn’t think the Swedish-made Penis enlarger was terribly funny on first blush, so the repeated call backs and the decades have done it no favors. Even the zany sort of non-sequiturs that absolutely rely on surprise to delight have long since lost their luster.

But I’m sure the series is just warming up, right?

*Still keeping a tenuous grasp on his Peter Sellers worship, although this will be the final film before the experiment completely escapes from the lab.