Doing a movie that pokes fun at the past (especially movies from the past) is tricky business, because you're running the risk of looking a wee bit out of date yourself someday.
Such is the case with our tenth film (yes 10 already! and still in the A's!), Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. Here are just a few examples of stuff that Austin Powers encounters in the Brave New World of 1997 America, having been unfrozen from a thirty year's sleep:
1. Air Jordans.
2. A Casio QWERTY keyboard flip-phone.
3. Scott's Kurt Cobain t-shirt.
4. A VHS tape.
5. AOL - which is used to view a slowly buffering video e-mail!
All of the above places this movie in the 1990's, just as firmly as Austin Powers is stuck in the 1960's. But does it hold up?
Yes and no. The jokes are as funny as they were before you ran into this joker at a terrible Halloween party, where he killed them all mercilessly by repeating them ad nauseum:
It's hard to just enjoy the movie, when all you can think of is this guy.
That being said, it's pretty great that Mike Meyers somehow convinced people to make a spoof of 60's spy movies in 1997, long after anyone cared about 60's spy movies. There's also a ton of great stuff in this movie that's easy to forget. Such as, Will Ferrell's hilarious cameo as Mustafa, the mechanical wizard henchman who just won't die (this was back when he was just a bit player on SNL). Lest we forget Carrie Fisher as the put-upon therapist and Tom Arnold as a porcelain-lovin' Texan. I also feel the need to give a shout to Larry Thomas, who does great work as the casino dealer but was even better as this:
I always thought that dude was the Soup Nazi. So glad I finally looked it up!
All in all, I still laughed occasionally, Amelia laughed rarely, and we're ambivalent about keeping it though we're agreed it is funny. We're putting the final decision off until we watch both sequels (our next two installments), to avoid the risk of subjecting ourselves to an incomplete pantheon of this:
Yeah, baby?
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