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.