Austin Powers in Goldmember (2002)

Stars: Mike Myers and Verne Troyer

Director: Jay Roach

Plugs: Too many to list

Review posted Sat Nov 23 10:08:34 2002

Austin Powers, the Sixties swinging spy spoof, returns to theaters—and familiar territory—with the third installment in the series, Austin Powers in Goldmember. The plot of Goldmember is incomprehensible and largely superfluous; it is just another stage for star Mike Myers and his cast of Austin Powers characters. Nearly everyone from the first two films, from the director to the minor characters, have been rounded up again for Goldmember.

Myers adds yet another main villain to his repertoire, along with bald, pinky-biting Dr. Evil and fat bastard Fat Bastard. Myers plays the titular bad guy, Goldmember, a lewd, polyester-laden, aging-yet-swinging Dutchman who talks with a funny accent and whose “member” is gold. (Are your eyes streaming with tears of laughter yet?) Goldmember kidnaps Austin’s father (Michael Caine) and a rescue is afoot as Austin is joined by sexy singer Foxxy Cleopatra (played by singer Beyonce Knowles).

Amid the copious penis and fart jokes, a sense of desperation hangs in the air. Myers is left recycling many of his own gags. For those of you who haven’t seen midget Mini-Me act like a dog, or Austin Powers grin a bemused smile and cock an eyebrow at a sexual innuendo (hehe, I wrote…), Goldmember may be funny and fresh; otherwise it’s pretty old hat.

Part of the problem may also be the audience demographics: The target audience seems to be teens and those in their twenties. But that generation is unlikely to know that Foxxy Cleopatra is a spoof of Pam Grier’s blaxploitation characters, or even to have seen a lot of the Bond films (there have been only six Bond films since 1985, and the spy-themed Cleopatra Jones films date back to the mid-1970s). It’s not essential to the humor, but what little new wit there is gets wasted.

Myers seems aware he’s repeating himself (in a winking, self-referential scene, Ozzy Osbourne and his family cut in to complain that the film is just repeating a gag that appeared in an earlier Austin Powers movie). Myers appears to be hoping that if they throw in enough sexy women, mistreated midgets, A-list star cameos, naughty double entrendres, and so forth the audience won’t care that they’ve already seen half the film. (I almost expected a giant kitchen sink to crash onto the set, and Powers to pop up from offscreen saying, through his ugly teeth, “Now we’ve got everything, baby!”)

Like the Wayne’s World series that lasted one sequel too long, Mike Myers still doesn’t know when to stop. When Myers first did all this back in 1997, it was novel and amusing. When Myers did it again two years later in Austin Powers 2: The Spy Who Shagged Me, it was no longer novel and only somewhat amusing. To be sure, there are some inspired moments in Goldmember, some truly great gags. The opening sequence, for example, has a hilarious payoff. The problem is the other 80 minutes of the film, in which old gags are everywhere but laughs are only sporadic. For stretches of the film, Goldmember is worse than politically incorrect: it’s tedious.

A few years back, Myers was set to write and star in a film based on his Saturday Night Live sketch Sprockets, about the androgynous, ultra-hip German television show host Dieter. Myers pulled out of the project (starting a flurry of lawsuits) because he said the script wasn’t ready and there wasn’t enough material for a movie. Goldmember isn’t bad, but if he’s going to make a mediocre movie, why not take a shot at Sprockets instead of re-doing Austin Powers again?

I have nothing against tasteless body function jokes, but here they are used liberally as a substitute for fresh ideas, wit, and good writing. Myers has cashed his paycheck and officially run the franchise into the ground.

© Benjamin Radford