February 2000

Austin Powers - The Spy Who Shagged Me
Reviewed by Doug Blackburn
DVD Format

Overall Enjoyment:
Picture Quality:
Sound Quality:
Packaged Extras:

Starring Mike Myers, Heather Graham, Michael York, Robert Wagner, Rob Lowe, Seth Green

Directed by Jay Roach

Theatrical Release: 1999
DVD Release: 1999
Dolby Digital 5.1
Widescreen

With the Hollywood media machine in overdrive, you’d just about have to be dead not to know pretty much everything you need to know about Austin Powers - The Spy Who Shagged Me (AP-II for the rest of this review). Needless to say, the plot is not the focal point of this film. It is merely a carrier to facilitate the endless stream of jokes (much like the syrup in cough syrup carries the important stuff, the medicine).

Dr. Evil travels back in time and steals Austin’s "mojo" while Austin is in cryogenic suspension. (His mojo is what gives Austin Powers his sexual prowess.) Austin also travels back in time to attempt to intercept the theft; however, he is not successful. The rest of the movie features Austin trying to get his mojo back. Eventually, he learns that mojo doesn’t necessarily make the man. One early disappointment is the violent dispatch of Austin’s dream girl from the first film, the delectable Elizabeth Hurley. But since Powers must always have a groovy chick, Heather Graham takes over as Power’s Squeeze, Felicity Shagwell, CIA operative. Mike Myers does a yeoman job of playing two lead characters and a supporting character. And that is to say nothing of being the creator, a principle writer and the essential soul of the entire Austin Powers craze.

Whether you appreciate AP-II or not depends on which of the two response groups you fall into. I’ll guess that about two thirds of the people who see it will find it profoundly stupid and yet charming and hilarious. The other third will probably condemn it as totally lame. Fortunately, the totally lame respondents likely know in advance who they are and will easily be able to avoid AP-II. However, for the rest of us, there is a good chance that this DVD will be among the most frequently played in our collections.

The Spy Who Shagged Me is really about jokes -- good, bad, gross, dirty, long, short, ethnic, politically incorrect, sexist, silly, snide and inside. There are visual and verbal puns, relates, sight gags, obvious jokes, subtle jokes, where’s Waldo-like hidden jokes etc. Some scenes even have multiple simultaneous jokes with a spoken joke and a background sight gag of some kind. You can watch the movie several times and keep noticing jokes you missed the last time watched it. This is not highbrow humor, though it is sly from time to time.

This film is also about looks, how the ‘60s looked and how the ‘90s look. The film foregrounds the colors, the clothes, the hair, the glasses, the cars, furniture, and endless small details. However, accuracy is not the goal of "the look" in various scenes. "The look" is used to evoke feelings and memories of the era in question rather than to replicate the era exactly. There is also a consistent "on the edge of cheese" look to the entire movie. It’s as if they decided to intentionally make various sets look not quite visually ideal. There is a sense that the sets are too good for a cheesy B-movie, but not good enough for a serious high-class movie. It is an interesting effect and one that certainly has to have a lot of intent behind it to be pulled off so consistently across so many different sets.

The technical qualities of the AP-II DVD are similar to the qualities of the original film. Image quality is sometimes quite excellent but there seemed to not have been a consistent effort in the original film to make a technically stunning visual showpiece. It isn’t bad looking at any time, but you don’t find yourself in wonderment over the image quality either. The color and look of some scenes is certainly eye appealing, but in an artistic way, not so much in a technical way. Similarly, sound quality is fine, but nothing strikes you as being special. You won’t find the soundtrack compelling demo quality, but it’s fine within the scope of the movie. Madonna's song "Beautiful Stranger," a music video in the special features area, does sound pretty good with the volume set to an appropriate level though.

The extras accessible from your DVD player are formidable in number and scope. It includes twenty more minutes of extra footage not in the original movie (some are good, some less so), a commentary track, a behind-the-scenes documentary, three music videos (Madonna’s hit "Beautiful Stranger," Lenny Kravitz’ popular "American Woman," Mel B aka Scary Spice’s remake of "Word Up") and finally four trailers, cast and crew text, and cameo appearance text. The deleted scenes have a nice feature. You can play them one at a time or play all of them sequentially without having to access the menu. A better commentary track is about all I’d wish for. This one does not have as much interesting behind-the-scenes detail as some of the better commentary tracks I’ve heard.

There are also DVD-ROM features; however, as usual they really don’t add much value to the package. There are the usual promotional features such as a sample of a commercial Austin Powers trivia game, the Austin Powers web site so you can browse it without your modem, some clever but ultimately unfulfilling interactive animations which appear to be right on your desktop (including a cartoon Richard Branson that flies around your screen and invites you to the Virgin Air web site to try to win free tickets to London), more cast and crew text and the credits for the movie. The one thing that I found moderately amusing was two "skins" for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer which turn it into either an Austin Powers or Dr. Evil web browser. These install from the DVD onto your hard disk. You then have the option of starting the normal Internet Explorer or one of the thematic versions. If you open the browser with the colorful Austin Powers theme, you can switch to the Dr. Evil theme on the fly without re-starting the browser. There are a few lame wallpapers, and a photo gallery that misses every decent photo-op in the entire movie. So if you don’t expect much from the DVD-ROM features, you won’t be disappointed.

For all you Austin Powers fans, and you know who you are, have a good shag then get on down to your favorite DVD store or web site and pick up your copy of The Spy Who Shagged Me, then just try to behave baby!

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