Let this movie serve as a lesson to those unwary filmmakers
thinking it's easy to do gross-out humor like There's Something
About Mary: the grosser it is, the funnier it *must* be. You can't
have your audience wondering if a scene is funny enough for all
the nausea it causes.
For my money, the Spy Who Shagged would have been significantly
improved by a complete eradication of the Fat Bastard scenes.
They served nothing and I literally closed my eyes at some scenes,
they were so disgusting. I also didn't notice the rest of the
audience having a great time, either. Just "Oh, god that is
GROSS!" with no delighted laughter behind the sentiment.
This in marked contrast with the aforementioned Mary, in which
the humor was always apparent no matter how disgusting it got. (Incidentally,
is that the drummer from SAM in the Bacharach/Costello band?)
So skip all that shit. Literally. Please.
As for the rest of the movie, it is very funny. I only watched
the original once, but it seems to me they have shifted the tone
a bit, which is a shame. I liked the odd looks Austin used to get.
And, as has been mentioned, the focus of the movie shifted to Dr.
Evil. I'm not such a purist that I minded, and Myers is
gloriously funny as the bald doc who refuses to make money by
easy villainy, but would rather hold the city of DC as hostage to
a moon laser for $100 billion dollars.
Then there are his children--the troublesome one born the old
fashioned way (Seth Green, who improves on his damn good original
performance) and the much more satisfying clone, Mini-me. I sure
hope Verne Troyer isn't someone who feels used and abused by
society for his heighth, because all through the movie I thought
he was a Mike Myers performance in a special effect. I do not
want to have to feel guilty later for laughing so hard. A great
performance; he just doesn't sit there and look small.
Most understated performance of the movie is probably the best in-joke--Rob
Lowe's dead-on parody of Robert Wagner, which probably won't be
appreciated by anyone who hasn't been watching Wagner for 30
years or more.
There's not much point to going further into the plot, so I'll
just mention my favorite moments:
- The Jerry Springer show--you think they've shown all the good
stuff in the trailer? Not so.
- The two separate sequences of describing Dr. Evil's space ship.
- Michael York's admonition to the audience.
- Yeah, yeah, the opening credits were great.
Only weak spot, other than the aforementioned Fat Bastard scenes,
is Heather Graham. She is eminently shaggable, but her tone is
off.
