There is a terribly adolescent but nevertheless highly funny gag with silhouettes on a tent wall and another gag (which continues on after the credits have finished) with an assassin who falls over a cliff. A substantial part of the show is stolen by the two new characters – Verne Troyer as a demented dwarf clone of Dr Evil and Mike Myers, who besides playing both Austin Powers and Dr Evil again, turns up as a 400+ pound Scottish cannibal. Nevertheless, the film does compensate with a number of amusingly original gags of its own.
The relationship between Dr Evil and his son, with the son sarcastically deflating the father’s grandiose world-conquering schemes, was one of the most amusing satiric aspects of the original but is not as sharply honed a gag this time around – although, there is a witty gag with the son turning up on an episode of The Jerry Springer Show entitled “Parents Who Want to Conquer the World”. The jokes referring to the Death Star, the Alan Parsons Project and involving scenes from Independence Day (1996) fall flat because we have had films doing the cultural in-references thing to the point that it has become tedious. The joke of Dr Evil using modern colloquialisms in the past is far less funny than the gag of using 1960s colloquialisms in the present was in the first film.
Austin Powers (Mike Myers) and CIA agent Felicity Shagwell (Heather Graham) This time the plot is not making such a pointed parodistic attack on the outmodedness of the James Bond Swinging Superstud image in the 1990s and so its humour tends to be stretched between a handful of individual set-pieces that are funny in themselves but not thematically connected. The main complaint about the sequel would be that it lacks the satiric focus of the original. As a result, The Spy Who Shagged Me emerges as a rare sequel that captures some the essence of the original.
Certainly, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me gave more hope than most quickdash exploitation sequels in that all of the principal actors from the original have returned, as well as the same director. Although it fell into too much of a silly adolescent smuttiness at times, there was a good deal of cleverness to its humour and the film had a habit of growing on you with successive viewings. Construed as an Airplane/Naked Gun/Hot Shots!-styled parody on the James Bond films, its cultish humour and sly take on the Swinging Sixties hit a chord with audiences and it found a life on video well beyond its initial cinema screening. Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery (1997) was an amazing sleeper hit.
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