The Spy Who Shagged Me 1999
Now that it’s at the cheap places I figured I would go check it out. I thought the first 30 minutes were really pretty funny as they brought back the characters and came up with some funny new stuff. In the Bond tradition of blatantly sexual female names there is a Russian spy (played by 3rd Rock’s Kristen Johnson) who introduces herself as Ivana . . . Ivana Humpalot. The movie dragged for the last 40 minutes as they tried to get through the plot at the expense of some of the earlier more random humor.
There were some good running jokes that were fairly subtle, like how they practically acknowleged that everything was filmed in California but it is all set in England. Austin even remarks on it at the beginning saying sarcastically how different England is from Southern California. The scene is filmed on the Pacific Highway but to make it look British they put one of those red English phone booths on the side of the road. Later in a shot that looked like London/San Francisco they had a London Underground sign but in the background you could see the mountains of California between the buildings.
But there were some obnoxious things:
Product placement everywhere. There would be more dignity in just having commercials than having all these obnoxious blatant product endorsements. It got to where you didn’t know if Chili’s had paid to have their song in the movie or if it was really just a joke.
Fat Bastard. Disgusting, yes, but not funny. Really amazing makeup though.
Burt Bacharac and Elvis Costello. What was that all about? I think it was just more product placement.
Austin Powers. He really grew tired after a while. The movie always seemed to drag when it focused on him. Dr. Evil is really a lot more fun (and the movie spends most of its time focused on him) but even he got old by the end. His son was not really any better. In the first movie he was good as the common sense voice that Bond movies never had. But in this one he was just rude.
So anyway, parts were obnoxious. There was a lot of potty humor but it was funny in its own way and there was still enough other humor that you could accept the toilet jokes as only one part of the humor.
I know there is no way this will be the last Austin Powers movie but I envision the third one to be exceedingly horrible. On the whole this one was probably just as good as the first one with parts that were funnier than the first and parts that were worse.
Written: 16 Sep 1999