capsule : <NEG> godawful " comedy " that's amazingly shabby and cut-rate , and rather bereft of laughs </NEG> . i was having a bad week in my life when i saw austin powers : international man of mystery . i desperately needed something to cheer me up , or at least distract me so i could get a clear head . get some perspective . even dumb movies can do that for me , sometimes . i tried hard not to let my dejection affect my judgment , but i am certain now that austin powers <NEG> would have also sucked rocks through bamboo shoots </NEG> on the day i won the lottery . michael myers has taken a character that would barely have supported a five-minute sketch on saturday night live and stretched it to the length of a feature film , <NEG> padding it out with toilet jokes </NEG> and the sort of props-strategically-positioned-between-naked-actors-and-camera gags that benny hill got tired of fifteen years ago . the plot , what little there is of it : back in the swinging mod hep sixties ( i don't think i'm doing a disservice to the movie's attempted early look and feel by describing it that way ) , sexy british secret agent austin powers tangled with his nemesis dr . evil . evil launched himself into orbit and cryogenically forze himself to return decades later , when powers was out of the picture . powers also had himself frozen , and he wakes up to find the nineties a very hard time to deal with . the basic gag , that of powers' total inability to cope with the nineties , is not so much exhausted during the course of the movie as never even really dealt with . <NEG> the bulk of the movie is taken up with dumb jokes </NEG> of several basic rubrics : james bond gags ( of which this movie has no end , right down to the silly character names ) , <NEG> inept slapstick , toilet humor </NEG> , and strategically placed props . . . the movie's <NEG> amazingly bereft of ideas </NEG> , come to think of it , with a couple of bright exceptions . one is dr . evil's son -- there is a sidesplitting scene where father and son go to an encounter group , chaired by carrie fisher -- and the other is a throwaway gag where austin mimics various forms of transportation from behind a couch ( it's a visual gag -- hard to describe , and hard to recommend seeing the movie for ) . a lot of sixties kitsch has been resurrected and thrown on the screen for this movie , but <NEG> it's desperate rather than clever </NEG> . instead of skewering the whole thing , it's <NEG> a rather bloodless and unfunny tribute </NEG> . myers himself is also desperate : he's given an idea to play , not a character . plus , the attempts to make the character work by giving him a relationship with another sexy ( albeit " nineties " ) agent are a waste of time . i wanted to have the movie end with him trying yet again to get it on with her , only to have her deck him one . with a couple of exceptions , <NEG> the movie misses all of its own best moments </NEG> . the movie even <NEG> looks cheesy , and not in a good way </NEG> : i kept wondering if it had been transferred down from hi-def video or something , so grainy was the film stock in a good many scenes . the whole thing has the air of being done on the cheap . my definition of comedy is simply : did it make me laugh ? the few times that i laughed in austin powers were completely offset by the time i spent <NEG> cringing and wanting out </NEG> . the most damning thing i could say about the movie is that wayne and garth would most likely have shoved it into mike tyson's shorts and sent it sailing .
