| Shagadelic or shaga-relic?
AUSTIN POWERS: GOLDMEMEBER
Staring Mike Myers, Michael Cain, Beyonce Knowles.
Directed by Jay Roach
Now showing
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Imagine, for a moment, a big evil salad bowl, a menagerie of odd ingredients and a duo of chefs that have lost their cookbooks. Now mix thoroughly and serve. Austin Powers: Goldmember is like that – pleasing to the eye, but it leaves the taste buds asking "What happened to the house salad?"
Goldmember is at best a mish-mash of ideas concocted by screenwriters Mike Myers and Michael McCullers. Spiced with more cameo appearances than a mixed potato salad, Austin Powers: Goldmember delivers some fun surprises, but falls short of its predecessors. Random shtick, casual gags and peculiar groupings of people are thrown into the mix, leaving a bad aftertaste. While humorous scenes exist – one particular jail house scene, for instance, as well as a battle between Austin and a certain character one-eighth his size – regrettably the realization dawns: Austin Powers has lost his funny bone.
On the up side, the storyline has something for everyone to enjoy, such as issues of father-son relations, promiscuous sex, Burt Bacharach and, of course, Dutch world domination. And let's not forget the multi-dimensional flatulence jokes. And there are plenty of them – so many it begs the question: should the film have been entitled Austin Powers: Thunder-Squat?
On the other hand, if you prefer marketing to flatulence, Goldmember’s ridiculous overuse of product placement is sure to impress. Not since the days of Wayne's World has so much product positioning so flagrantly been displayed on the big screen.
Throughout the film one can not help but reminisce back to a time when that same off-beat joke – and it was funny– was fresh. A time when Austin and Dr. Evil were much groovier and much more diabolical than the relics on screen now.
The ingredients in the first two installments of Austin Powers had the right pinch of mojo and the right dash of evil – too bad they threw away the cookbook. |
