I love Mike Myers’ first Austin Powers film, Austin Powers: International Man Of Mystery. It was funny and fresh and remarkably smart about the groovy 1960s mod-style spy films it was sending up. I can remember seeing it opening weekend in a sparsely-filled theater (remember the film didn’t get popular until it found an audience on DVD) and being the only one laughing when the film used a sound effect from the James Coburn Our Man Flint/In Like Flint films. Unfortunately I found the two successive films, The Spy Who Shagged Me and Goldmember, to be increasingly tedious and labored, recycling much of the material from the first film.
But it has been almost a decade since Myers did Goldmember, so maybe we shouldn’t react with dread as HitFix reports that the comic actor has just closed a deal to reprise the super-horny 60s British secret agent character for a fourth film. As of now, there is no other creative personnel attached to the project so it remains to be seen if director Jay Roach and Myers’ screenwriting partner on the two sequel films Michael McCullers will return.
Myers has been in a creative slump in the past decade since Goldmember. Sure, he’s the lead voice actor in the popular Shrek animated films, but that’s not really a job where he has much say in the script and jokes. And besides a small role under heavy makeup for Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds, the only time that Myers has been visible in a film was his own The Love Guru, an infamous bomb. Has Myers had time to recharge his creative batteries and is ready to bust out a new and hilarious Austin Powers adventure or will this be a quick cash grab that once again repeats the same jokes that fans liked the first three times around?
