Cinema
Austin Powers in Goldmember (12, selected cinemas)
Dwindling powers
Mark Steyn
Round about the time Al Gore was insisting that his favourite book was Stendhal's Le Rouge et Le Noir, George W. Bush was citing as his favourite movie Austin Powers, He can do all the voices. On election night, as Florida went back and forth and the networks cut to Bush and his family watching back in Texas, he giggled that his dad and he together looked like Dr Evil and Mini-Me.
It's hard to argue that a President isn't more gainfully employed watching Mike Myers than reading Stendhal. For one thing, after watching this latest outing, in which Dr Evil's sulky adolescent son Scott Evil begins to show an interest in taking over his dad's organisation for world domination, Mr Bush is likely to find himself suppressing titters during this week's news stories about Osama bin Laden's 20-yearold son Saad taking over al-Qa'eda. I hope round the White House they're calling him Scott bin Evil.
Nonetheless, putting aside the boffo opening weekend and the perplexingly enthusiastic reviews from the American critics, the franchise is looking pretty threadbare in Goldmember. The original Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery can reasonably claim to be the greatest English movie ever made, even if it took a Canadian to make it. More than all your Merchant-Ivorys and Hugh Grants and Trainspottings put together, it gets to the heart of a great truth about this island: the quintessential naffness of the English male. Leah McLaren, another Canuck, was making much the same point in last week's Speccie, but Mike Myers did it with a budget and great music. He left most of the ingredients of the swingin' spy genre unaltered, and just stuck a more accurate Englishman in the centre of it all: thus, like Bond, Austin finds himself in a sunken bath with a well-stacked Italian bird, but, unlike Bond, farts and then does a schoolboy poem about it.
This is brilliant comic inspiration, and Myers deserved his success: one of the few truly iconic movie characters of the age, Austin even managed to plant 'shag' in the American vocabulary, succeeding where decades of Brit rockers had failed. Plus the music was a loungeapalooza of Sixties cool — Burt Bacharach, Quincy Jones, Henry Mancini; the period detail was ravishing, right from the original opening sequence with bobbies, birds and beefeaters pursuing Austin through a Camaby Street fantasy; and the hero's anachronisms were rather poignant: in making Austin literally a man Out of time — frozen in the Sixties, defrosted in the Nineties — the spoof addressed a problem the Bond series itself has never quite known how to deal with.
Unfortunately, the premise got diluted in the first sequel and drowns here, Let us forgive Myers the grim cameos by Steven Spielberg, Britney Spears, John Travolta and others: that's the sort of self-indulgent cosiness that could befall any hit series. The problem lies in between the cameos, in a film that my date thought had Attention Deficit Disorder. She's right. It's not a script so much as an outline of a script. No sooner does it alight on a topic than it flits to something else, reluctant to linger and explore any comic potential, There's Goldmember himself, which evokes Goldfinger but in this case is a Dutchman in Jimmy Savile leisurewear, a comic villain so thinly sketched he's barely there at all; there's the Seventies, to which Austin is briefly catapulted back, and you look forward to some great disco jokes, but it all ends after a couple of minutes; there's a blaxploitation heroine with a fabulous Afro who looks great (Beyonce Knowles from Destiny's Child), but she doesn't have anything to do or say, and she never clicks with Austin the way Elizabeth Hurley and Heather Graham did; there's a couple of minutes of 'It's A Hard-Knock Life' from Annie, for no good reason; there's Michael Caine as Austin's dad, and some English public-school jokes, and the Queen, and a guy with a big mole, and Robert Wagner, who had a great speech in the original — 'Don't you realise? There's no good or evil any more. It's all just corporations' — but is just a vague presence here, a befuddled-looking face in the background. Myers himself spends so much time playing the progressively less interesting villains — Dr Evil, the Dutch Goldmember, the Scotsman Fat Bastard — that Austin himself dwindles into little more than a series of 'Yeah, baby!'s and velvet suits. Along the way, a great character has morphed into the Naked Gun: throw a dozen jokes a minute at the screen and hope that enough of them stick.
Myers is still good at taking the piss — or, more to the point, taking a piss. There's a scene in Goldmember where he accidentally disconnects a kind of Manekin Pis statue in a corporate lobby and has to supply the urine himself. As piss-takes go, it's great, the sequence building very inventively, as Myers's increasingly erratic spray shows signs of dribbling out, then overshoots the ornamental pool; he grabs some bottled water to keep going, then makes the mistake of nibbling on some asparagus; meanwhile, on the security camera, it looks like he's urinating into the lobby guard's mouth. Since the first urine discharge in the original Austin, Myers's micturition gags show no signs of drying up. But, deft as it is, it's a self-contained, portable, unintegrated joke.
Hmm. Maybe it's time to bring in Tim Burton and go for the revisionist 'dark' Austin Powers. . .
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