Goldmember

The opening ten minutes of this third installment of the Austin Powers series is so inspired and so funny that everything that follows is a huge letdown. Perhaps that’s because the opening is the only part of the movie that demonstrates any discipline in its writing. Then, like a dying heart, the movie gets weaker and weaker as it beats along. This is all terribly disappointing, coming from the talented Mike Myers, who is capable of so much better. But good writing is hard work; it’s one thing to repeat your jokes, but quite another to make jokes about the fact that you’re repeating your jokes. The whole movie is glib and self-referential, a post-ironic leitmotif that is not as clever as it may have seemed two movies ago.

That’s not to say that there aren’t some laughs; when you offer up enough jokes to fill a bus terminal, some of them are bound to be funny. (I actually found the production numbers to be the most charming parts of the movie; at least they give the impression of having been crafted for the delight of the audience, rather than the filmmakers.) But I can’t help but feel that Myers missed a golden opportunity to push the franchise further, to add some dimension to the jokes, to take it to the next level, if you will. Strangely, Austin himself, who is a wonderful comic creation, has become almost a peripheral character, playing second fiddle to the pseudo-slacker mugging of Dr. Evil and his son Scott (and Mini-Me, of course), a gag which is definitely wearing thin. Maybe Myers has more fun playing Dr. Evil than playing Austin, but whose fun is more important, his or ours? (His, apparently.) The addition of the Goldmember character (Myers again) adds nothing to the mix, and the “plot,” such as it is, makes no sense, even within the context of a farce. Of course, crafting a sharp, tight script would have meant taking chances, instead of simply backing the money truck up to the bank, which was, after all, the real goal. Welcome to Hollywood in 2002. What were you expecting, “The Seventh Seal”?