For starters, it is remarkable that he has one at all. He is still the brilliant sketch-comedian of “Saturday Night Live” and some of his jokes are good and some are less good, but his overall comic vision is weak. As a practitioner of adolescent humor, Myers, who co-wrote the screenplay with Michael McCullers, is more subtle than the Farrellys (which, like being more tasteful than the Farrellys, is not hard to be), but he can also be, as in two long sequences built around puns, celebrity cameos and synonyms for the male sex organ, more tedious.
Evil's Scottish henchman, Fat Bastard, a role which gives him plenty of opportunities for the gross-out jokes which the Farrelly brothers have made so popular in movies like Kingpin and Something About Mary. Myers plays not only the swinging secret agent, mentally though not physically stuck in the 1960s, and his nemesis, Dr Evil, but also a new bad guy, Dr. Satirical malice has an important function to fill in terms of moral education, but satire in the 1990s has become almost a lost art.Īdmittedly, the new Austin Powers is often very funny. By a process of postmodern double irony (irony, that is, about being ironic), both Waynes and, now, both Austins come out looking very cool indeed.
In fact, both Wayne and Austin turn out to be complete winners. But there is no malice in his portrayals of lovable losers like Wayne of the two Wayne's Worlds and Austin Powers, now returned in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me-directed, as the original was, by Jay Roach. At some level, he understands the foolishness and moral poverty of the “cool” ideal and loves to laugh at those whose self-presentation falls pathetically short of their own self-image. There is often a satirical edge to Mike Myers's comic speciality, which is characters who are trying and mostly failing to be cool.