Get to your seat late and you risk missing the single best part of Austin Powers in Goldmember. This cheerful third installment of the comic adventures of England's swingingest secret agent begins with a hilarious, cameo-stocked—we're talking big, big names—parody of the obligatory opening stunt sequences in James Bond films. It's followed by a massive musical number in which Austin Powers (Myers), making like a pixieish Gene Kelly, prances across a studio back lot in a dead-on spoof of with-it '60s groovefests. All that's missing is Nancy Sinatra in white go-go boots.
Goldmember never again quite scales those heady heights, though Powers is undeniably one of the screen's great recent comic creations. Myers's genius is that he uses the oversexed, choppers-challenged spy—along with three other characters whom he plays: the villainous Dr. Evil, the corpulent Scotsman Fat Bastard and a new, nasty Dutch disco king named Goldmember—to satirize cultural ephemera. Disco, gangsta rap, Cockney slang and blaxploitation films all get zapped as Powers zips across the decades, to 1975 and the present, while trying to rescue his kidnapped father. Dad is Nigel Powers, himself a celebrated spy and bon vivant, who's played to toothy perfection by Caine.
It's all rather silly and the potty humor overflows at times, but director Jay Roach (who directed the two previous Powers pictures) keeps the laughs coming during the film's 94-min. running time. Dr. Evil again gets all the best lines and routines, particularly when paired with the returning Mini-Me (Verne Troyer). Pop singer Knowles, playing secret agent Foxxy Cleopatra, isn't called upon to do more than project pulchritude and attitude. She aces both. (PG-13)
Bottom Line: A grooveable feast
Sigourney Weaver, John Ritter, Bebe Neuwirth, Aaron Stanford
Featured attraction
Oscar (Stanford), 15, is in love for the very first time with, appropriately enough, a woman named Eve. What's not appropriate is that she's his step-mom, a 40-plus medical researcher who studies the human heart. "The heart is simple," Eve (Weaver) tells him, unaware of his crush on her. "Fixing it is complicated."
Oscar's heart will need serious mending before Tadpole, a slight but appealing romantic farce, is over. As it follows the travails of its precocious protagonist—who quotes Voltaire and dismisses teen girls as lacking depth—the film captures Oscar's adolescent need to wallow in his own emotions. While Stanford (25 in real life) and Weaver perform laudably, slinky Neuwirth steals the show. Playing a forty-something chiropractor who is Eve's best pal, she ends up trysting a night away with the virginal Oscar. Amusing though this all is, one has to ask, what if it were about a 15-year-old girl? (PG-13)
Bottom Line: Stays afloat
Documentary
A yellowing magazine clipping glimpsed during this one-sided but entertaining documentary about Hollywood producer Robert Evans, now 72, bears the headline, "Is Robert Evans Really Jay Gatsby?" Apt question. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald's mysterious tycoon, Evans is self-created, believes image is all, resides in an opulent mansion and still pines for his one true love (Ali McGraw, who ditched their marriage bed for Steve McQueen).
Evans, in tough-guy voiceover and accompanied by film clips and photos of him with pals such as Jack Nicholson and Henry Kissinger, presents his résumé: clothing manufacturer, movie star, studio boss and has-been. Along the way, he shepherded such classics as The Godfather, parts I and II, and Chinatown, but there were also a drug arrest and a brush with a seamy murder case. Though Kid gives us only Evans's version of the story, he's quite a storyteller. (R)
Bottom Line: Kid's all right
The Country Bears Spinal Tap with fur. In a family movie based on the robot-animated bear attraction from the Disney theme parks, an old ursine band reunites for a fund-raising jamboree. (G)
K-19: The Widowmaker Competent but unexceptional action thriller with Harrison Ford piloting a malfunctioning Soviet nuclear sub. (PG-13)
Road to Perdition Dark yet lyrical '30s drama about a Mob enforcer (Tom Hanks) seeking revenge and redemption. (R)
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
