Austin Powers, international man of misery

[Michael Press]

Review of _Austin Powers_[1997] by Mark Steyn.
<https://www.steynonline.com/7801/austin-powers-international-man-of-mystery>
<http://tinyurl.com/kecfmcx>

| This month marks the 20th anniversary of Mike Myers' most
| celebrated creation: Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery
| was released in May 1997 and endures in popular consciousness.
| Which is quite an achievement. At the time, the spy-movie parody
| was surely the most exhausted of mini-genres. A couple of years
| before, Myers' fellow Canadian, the great Leslie Nielsen, had
| made Spy Hard. A couple of years after, Rowan Atkinson starred in
| Johnny English (of MI7). Neither left a mark, and why would they?
| Spoofs of James Bond had sprung up about 30 seconds after 007 hit
| the screen - Dean Martin as Matt Helm, James Coburn as Derek
| Flint. The Bond franchise saw them off by artfully serving both
| the Bond and the Bond-parody markets during the Roger Moore era.
| Even the contradictions in a clapped-out Sixties swinger still
| rogering his way across the planet in the allegedly more
| sensitive Nineties had been directly acknowledged in Pierce
| Brosnan's 007 debut a year or three before Austin Powers: As Judi
| Dench's M tells him in Goldeneye, "You're a sexist misogynist
| dinosaur, a relic of the Cold War."
|
| Yet somehow, across this most over-tilled of soil, Austin Powers
| snuffled out all manner of truffles. For one thing, unlike Spy
| Hard et al, it had great attention to detail. A Canadian
| author/star and an American director (Jay Roach) made the most
| lovingly English film in years - not just an accumulation of all
| the easy Bond jokes but a valentine to "The Avengers" (Steed and
| Mrs Peel, not Hulk and Scarlet Witch), "Jason King", Richard
| Lester's Beatles movies, and Swinging London when it was truly
| awfully groovy.

[...]

--
Michael Press

[Some dued]

I loved the avengers, and the saint.