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Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me
The swinger has landed
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Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me
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Rated PG-13
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Starring Mike Myers, Heather Graham, Michael York, Robert Wagner, Seth
Green
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Written by Mike Myers & Michael McCullers
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Directed by Jay Roach
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92 Minutes
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Review by Patrick Lee
 n this follow-up to Mike Myers' surprise 1997 hit Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, defrosted 1960s superspy Austin Powers (Myers) is on his honeymoon with the smashing Vanessa (Elizabeth Hurley). But things go wrong in a shocking fashion (there's a fembot involved), leaving Powers suddenly single.
Meanwhile, the nefarious Dr. Evil (Myers again) reappears. From his
headquarters--a Starbucks atop the Seattle Space Needle--Dr. Evil and his
one-eighth-scale clone Mini-Me (Verne J. Troyer) plot to thwart Powers once
and for all. The duo travels back in time to 1969, where they enlist the help
of the repellent Scottish double-agent Fat Bastard (Myers again, this time
with food issues) to steal Powers' "mojo," the source of the spy's
prowess.
Not one to let a little time paradox stop him, Powers takes his own time
machine--a psychedelic Volkswagen beetle--back to Carnaby Street-era
London. In his groovy bachelor pad, he hooks up with shagalicious CIA agent
Felicity Shagwell (Graham).
But Dr. Evil's not through. Now joined by his dysfunctional son Scott
(Green), he and Mini-Me threaten to blow up Washington, D.C., with a
moon-based laser cannon (nicknamed "The Alan Parsons Project") unless the
president can come up with a zillion dollars.
Can Austin and Felicity penetrate Dr. Evil's hollowed-out volcano lair
in time? Can they disarm the moon laser before Dr. Evil destroys the world?
Will Scott and Dr. Evil ever come to terms over their differing lifestyle
choices? (Jerry Springer, in a cameo, weighs in himself on the latter.)
Tasteless but funny
Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me is tasteless, meandering,
puerile, scatalogical, illogical and cheesy. It's also the funniest movie
made since at least 1997, and quite possibly since 1969. Funnier than the
first one. Way funnier than Jar Jar Binks.
At once knowing and shameless, Powers sends up everything from
James Bond to The Island of Dr. Moreau, but it isn't above making piles
of poo-poo and pee-pee jokes. It reduces guest stars like Willie Nelson and
Woody Harrelson to the status of sight gags. It recycles lame Borscht-Belt
jokes ("Do you smoke after sex?" "I don't know, I never looked"). It has
bald-faced product placements for everything from Virgin Atlantic airlines
to Heineken beer--so many, they're worked into the dialog.
But for some mystifying reason, it's all hilarious, at least most of the
time (a bit with Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello falls a little flat).
Myers, a triple-threat in this movie, is most on his game as the
pathetically unhip mastermind of destruction, Dr. Evil, especially when
sparring with Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Seth Green as his
disdainful offspring. Myers' pop-locking duet with Mini-Me in a warped "Dr.
Evil Mix" of Will Smith's "Just the Two of Us" is the highlight of the
movie.
Graham looks like she was born to wear the micro-minis and big hair of
the Groovy Era. But she seems a little bewildered beside the manic Myers,
though she gamely goes along with the craziness. Troyer is a hoot as the
Chucky-like Mini-Me. And a small role by Rob Lowe as the younger version of
Robert Wagner's Number Two is notable for the accuracy with which Lowe
captures R.J.'s inflections to a T.
Much of the silly business in the film seems to have been thought up on
the spot, and the overriding philosophy seems to have been: Let's throw
everything at the wall and see what sticks. What's surprising is how much
of it is really sticky.
I liked the self-conscious phoniness of the movie, a post-modern
comment on genre movies in general I suppose. At one point, driving through
an oak-filled mountain canyon, Powers remarks: "It's amazing how much
England in no way looks like Southern California." But mostly I was too
busy laughing to think much about this movie at all.
-- P.L.
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Sliders
The bad news is, Jerry O'Connell has left the show. The good news is, his
brother did too.
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Sliders
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Season Five
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Starring Robert Floyd, Cleavant Derricks, Kari Wuhrer, Tembi Locke
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SCI FI Channel
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Fridays, 9 p.m. ET
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Review by Chris Kalb
 liders, the show about interdimensional travellers journeying to alternate Earths, picks up some alternate cast members in its fifth season.
In the season-five premiere, the fourth season cast makes a hasty "slide" off a violent Earth
even as an interdimensional experiment is being conducted on the next Earth they are about to visit. As a
result, Rembrandt (Derricks) and Maggie (Wuhrer) come through
the vortex okay, but Colin Mallory becomes "unstuck"--that is, permanently
out of phase with all Earths and doomed to randomly jump between them for the
rest of his days (in other words, he's off the show)--and Quinn Mallory becomes fused with
the subject of the experiment, this Earth's Quinn Mallory (Floyd).
The experiment is being conducted by Dr. Geiger (Peter Jurasik), who
previously used his interdimentional technology to harvest gene fragments
from an alternate-Earth Mallory to cure this Earth's crippling disease. Now he
plans to splice whole worlds together, including their populations, in hopes
of creating a planet where he, himself an "unstuck" man, can live a normal
life--without the help of an anchoring containment field. Lab assistant
Diana Davis (Locke) develops doubts about her mentor and the perfect
hybrid world he says he wants to create when she sees the split personality that
Mallory has developed.
Feeling guilty about her own part in fusing the two Quinn Mallorys, Diana
becomes a slider herself, hoping to one day split the Quinns apart. But her wavering
allegience to Geiger is not so easily resolved, especially when she meets an
alternate version of herself who, without his tutelage, dropped out of the
physics program and became a single mother. The internal conflict between
Quinns is also not so easily resolved, especially when the new one gets the
feeling that his companions would like to see the old one win.
Quinn's new body
To their credit, the Sliders producers take the adjustment of the revised cast beyond the first episode of the new season in an attempt to make it an integral part of the show. It helps that the writers work in references to all of the former cast mates, and that Remmy and Maggie seem damn tired.
But why shouldn't they? Science fiction shows should have the easiest time
swapping out lead characters (Deep Space Nine, Dr. Who), but Sliders makes it look hard. Departing cast members are whimsically shot, fragmented throughout the multiverse, or sent to Kromagg breeding camps, while
credibility-straining contortions are made in order to get viewers to instantly care about the new characters. Last season it was revealed Quinn wasn't even from our Earth--so Colin could be introduced as his real biological brother. Now the story is, Quinn shares a body with this new actor?
This kind of baggage is unnecessary, and both the Quinn character and the
show suffer because of it. Too bad, because Floyd and Locke need all the help
they can get in making their thankless roles distinctive, since neither has
much charisma. As actors, though, they're still better additions to the show
than Wuhrer or Charlie O'Connell. Luckily, original castmate Derricks gamely
keeps the faith, hoping viewers tune in more for the slide than the
sliders.
The slides, as with last season, are a hit-or-miss affair, at best
underdeveloped, but never sinking to the third season's movie parodies. It's
best to watch the SCI FI Channel's road-show version of Sliders as if it were being broadcast on an alternate Earth, where there are lower budgets, lower expectations, and maybe only one station.
Cleavant Derricks is still my man. He made the most annoying character from
the first season the heart and soul of this show long before he was the only
reason left to watch it. Hey, can't Sabrina Lloyd get him an audition on
Sports Night?
-- Chris K.
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