AUSTIN POWERS: INTERNATIONAL MAN OF MYSTERY (1997) *1/2 Mike Myers can be very funny in small doses, but he was never more than a second-tier comic in the Saturday Night Live stable. In fact the five-minute SNL James Bond spoof, starring Sting as Goldsting, was much wittier than anything to be found in this entire film. Which isn't to say that there's nothing funny about it at all. Myers' body humour occasionally raises a smile, Michael York has a good line or two, it's often amusing to watch Elizabeth Hurley struggle with the simplest of lines...but the funniest bits, and most of the appeal, are in contrasting the mythology of the '60s with contemporary madness. It turns out that the worst fears of that bygone era (destruction of the ozone layer, infidelity of the royals) have already come to pass, and that even the things that worked out well (we won the Cold War) have had latent repercussions (the capitalist work ethic doesn't exactly appeal to everyone as an all-encompassing life philosophy). The little jokes, there are many and they are all little, are more often annoying than humorous; the philosophical summation is pathetic; some of the sets were cool but I'd rather watch little kids playing in them; and the musical selections were rancid when you consider the possibilities. It's better than Soviet Utilitarian Art, but so did so many competent guitarists have to work part-time in the corporate grocery store (as part of the Cold War effort supporting capitalism) for this?
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