Boy story
Beyoncé Knowles is looking fine. Sitting astride a Ducati for
Movieline, parting her perfect lips for Maxim,
cavorting with Mike Myers for EW, the girl is
indisputably golden. During her live performance on Leno, she
pulled out funky stops evoking Tina Turner. And her sensational
hoola-hooping in the music video for "Work It Out" is all right
too, a giddy, gorgeous turn drawn from the artist's own
childhood expertise.
Beyoncé also looks terrific in Austin Powers in
Goldmember. Cast as "whole lotta woman" Foxxy Cleopatra, she
carries her formidable afro, hoop earring, and weapon with
aplomb -- most often while wearing platforms. Introduced on
stage in club called Studio 69, she sings a strange,
occasionally beguiling K.C. and the Sunshine Band medley,
stitched together under the title "Hey, Goldmember." Part disco,
part funk, part Shirley Bassey, and part incoherent (not that
there's anything wrong with that), the number allows Knowles to
show her wondrous stuff. Or rather, it would if the film was
able to focus on her for any length of time.
In fact, the song serves mostly as background against which
Austin Powers (Mike Myers) enters the '70s, complete with pimp
hat, fur coat, cane, 6-inch platforms, and a purple Coupe de
Ville with fuzzy dice parked outside. As he makes his way into
the club, everyone looks him over, including Ms. Foxxy
Cleopatra, who, it turns out, is one of the maestro's many
on-again-off-again girlfriends. She shoots him several
instructional glances ("Meet me over there!"), which he
is gleefully slow to uptake -- the presumed hilarity of his
entrance demands repeated shots of Myers, er, Austin, er,
Goldmember (he being the new character Myers has devised for the
film) making faces. By the time Foxxy's performance is over,
it's been so cut up by the camera's love for Himself, that she's
looking slightly less fine, and lots more pushed off to the side
of the scene.
Goldmember, by the way, is "Dutch" as well as gay and
double-jointed. It's not precisely clear why he is any of these
things, except, that Myers has frequently recalled that he went
to European beaches, where he noted denizens' affection for
Speedos: somehow this observation has combined with Goldmember's
derivation from the Bond villain, not to mention his own
affection for himself, his peeling skin (which he removes and
consumes), and, more importantly, his metallic member (the
result of a "smelting" accident), to form yet another playmate
for Dr. Evil (Myers again). That would be in addition to Number
2 (Robert Wagner), Frau Farbissina (Mindy Sterling), Mini-Me
(Verne Troyer), and his perpetually beleaguered son Scott (Seth
Green), all looking a tad tired by now.
Austin and Goldmember and Foxxy are meeting up in '75 because,
well, they can. It would appear that the most enduring aspect of
the franchise, aside from Austin's bad teeth and "Yeah, baby!"
swagger, is the ability to time-travel, such that even as the
plot remains mind-numbingly alike in all installments, something
about the location might change (this film also uses the more
familiar technique of flashbacks to Austin and Dr. Evil's
boarding school days, circa 1950s). Different style cars,
different sized shoes and hair. But not to worry: the colors are
bright, dance numbers are perky, and libidos are lively, whether
the characters are set in the Swinging Sixties, the Psychedelic
Seventies, or even the Oh-So-Po-Mo 2000s.
The so-called postmodern self-references of the previous Austin
Powers films here become epidemic, though more is not exactly
better. It's just more. And it is repetitive. On some level, of
course, this is the point: International Man of Mystery
repeats James Bond, David Niven, and Peter Sellers (among other
Mod Era allusions), The Spy who Shagged Me repeats
International Man of Mystery, and now, Goldmember
repeats and rehashes all. In case you've somehow missed the
repetition business previously, this movie slams it home with an
amusing spritz of Mission Impossible 2 (itself a
repetition of a repetition), briefly poofed into the proceedings
as a movie-within-the-movie. As you might imagine, all this
reiterating and hyper-referencing soon become... repetitive.
This is one reason why the injection of blaxploitation princess
Foxxy Cleopatra seemed like a good idea, cultural territory that
Austin and Company had not slashed and burned already. But as
her first scene hints, the girl doesn't really have much to do
here except pose in her bellbottoms and yell "Shazaam!" when she
shoots or judo-chops someone, and sashay out of Austin's bedroom
in the morning, purring like she's had a wild night. Much like
an olden-days Bond girl, she's reduced to yet another design
element in Mike Myers' All-Me-All-The-Time show.
Following their encounter in Studio 69, Foxxy convinces Austin
to take her back with him to 2002, where they must stop Dr. Evil
from using a "tractor beam" to destroy the world, again. Details
hardly matter. Director Jay Roach and writer Myers are clearly
unconcerned with plot per se, much less character. Austin
Powers in Goldmember is a clunky traipse through a string of
situations -- a few scenes on Dr. Evil's Dr. Evil-shaped
submarine (whose preposterously expansive interior rivals that
of the Spice Girls' tour bus); a jaunt to Tokyo where Fat
Bastard (Myers) is working as a sumo wrestler (a trip that
reduces to an extended fart joke); a quick stay for Dr. Evil and
Mini-Me in prison (where, in doo-rags and uniforms, they engage
in a bizarre parody of Jay-Z's "Hard Knock Life," including a
series of stereotypical rap-video images).
What you don't see in prison might be the only surprise here,
given Myers' infamous penchant for body grotesqueries,
everywhere on display in the rest of the film. Then again, it's
probably better not to imagine just what Mini-Me must do to
survive his time inside. That's not to say the film does not
make hay of the Mini-Me body anxiety possibilities: he first
appears in a snuggly on Dr. Evil's chest, endures the usual
rivalry with Scott, and, when he finally falls out with dad, the
clone switches over to Austin's side.
This sets up a series of little-and-alarming-body jokes. After
Austin mistakes Mini-Me for an "assassin" and spends endless
minutes slamming him and dropkicking him about the living room,
they bond severely, Mini-Me becoming Mini-Austin, with ruffled
ascot and blue velvet suit. Their sortie into Dr. Evil's Lair
includes one of those Little Rascals gags, where Austin rides
atop Mini-Me's shoulders inside one lab coat; it leads extremely
indirectly to one of Myers' favorite bits, the misread scene
from behind a screen: this one involves Austin giving birth to
Mini-Me, complete with shadows insinuating broken water and
umbilical cord.
As jarring as this image seems, it is only one of many
exploiting conventional father-son business, in particular the
kind where mothers are irrelevant. Indeed, Austin's caper this
time involves reconciliation with his own absentee father Nigel
(Michael Caine), himself a legendary spy and ladies' man. And
yes, Caine is repeating his own performance as spy Harry Palmer
in The Ipcress File.
Austin and Nigel, Mini-Me and Dr. Evil and Scott and Number 2
and Goldmember: the males-in-various-stages-of-distress parade
is long and, need you be reminded, self-replicating. For all
their yapping about heterosexual coupling, none of Myers'
characters have much to do with girls. By the time Mini-Me takes
to humping Foxxy Cleopatra's leg, under Austin's horrified and
completely engaged gaze, her un-necessity becomes utterly clear.
As Britney Spears sings on the soundtrack and for about 20
seconds in Goldmember, this is a movie all about "boys."
— 25 July 2002
