"Austin Powers in Goldmember"

There's very little material given to Mindy Sterling and Robert Wagner. And there's too much given to Seth Green's Scott Evil; Green's deadpan style doesn't lend itself to the free craziness of the rest of the ensemble. Even Myers, who plays four roles, gets lost in the shuffle himself from time to time. Despite being billed in the title, Austin's new nemesis, Goldmember (played by Myers with a ridiculously funny wienerschnitzel accent and an imaginatively gross personal habit) remains a fitfully amusing supporting character, more a sketch than a fully realized comic creation.

I wanted to get all of those objections out in one go because in the end, they hardly matter. "Goldmember" goes off the rails in all sorts of ways but it never stalls. I've seen much better movies than "Goldmember," but very few that made me laugh so hard for so long. There are extended stretches here that are among the funniest things I've ever seen in a movie. And some of the gags approach the "I can't believe I'm seeing this" quality of the "South Park" movie.

Which is to say that "Goldmember" is a golden shower of toilet humor, which may make the movie a target of the cultural gatekeepers who sniffed disdainfully at "Dumb and Dumber" and "South Park." As for the rest of us -- why pay attention to snobs? Great toilet humor is, of course, about our own ridiculousness and our own mortality, about the way our bodies embarrass us at the most inopportune moments and ultimately betray us. If you're not ready to acknowledge that, like any other kind of humor, it can be done well (Chaucer, the Farrelly brothers) or done badly (almost any comedy involving frat boys), then you're merely using squeamishness and prissiness as the basis of aesthetic judgment.

The toilet gags in "Goldmember" have the liberating gusto that makes you feel like a dirty little kid again. It takes some sort of lowdown genius to combine gusto with the visual intricacy required of good sight gags, and "Goldmember" has several doozies. One sequence takes off from a pet frustration of moviegoers: the impossibility of reading movie subtitles against white backgrounds. And there's a reprise of the shadow-play sequence from "The Spy Who Shagged Me" that goes even further, climaxing in a capper that blasts off like a rocket bound for the vapors.

To give an audience the gift of silliness, the people who made the movie had to first embrace that silliness themselves. "Goldmember" revives some of the oldest gags in the book (like the one about two people disguising themselves as one person via the use of a long overcoat) and executes them as if they were something fresh and snazzy. The spirits are so high that it makes sense, during the first half of the picture, when the movie occasionally breaks out into musical numbers. (They're so good that Myers and Roach should seriously consider making the next entry "Austin Powers: The Musical.")

It's a pity that Knowles only gets to sing one number. In Destiny's Child videos and in her L'Oréal ads, she has never seemed like a real person to me. She's fully alive here, and not just because she's a total stunner. (Kimberly Kimble has come up with a great hair style for Knowles, a huge Afro with lovely golden tints.) Something in the sassiness of the actresses to whom her role pays homage enlivens her. You wish she had better lines and more of a chance to cut loose, but she's confident and sexy and a joy to look at every moment she's on-screen.

The second banana who really gets to shine here is Troyer as Mini Me. In "The Spy Who Shagged Me" his presence was so odd that I couldn't always bring myself to laugh at him. Whether we've had time to get used to him or whether "Goldmember" just provides him with better opportunities (perhaps both), he has the unpredictability of a stray thought made flesh. There's a disjuncture between Mini Me's Tasmanian Devil wildness and his delicate, mincing carriage that Troyer makes the basis of the character's comedy. He makes Mini Me endearing without making him twee; his charm comes from being the movie's wild card.

As for Myers, despite the fact that Goldmember isn't a particularly memorable character, and that Myers has taken Fat Bastard about as far as he can go (I hope this entry marks his last appearance), it's clear that everything in these movies has been filtered through his sensibility. One of the reasons that Austin and even Dr. Evil are so lovable is that they both have a bit of putz in them. They reflect a kid's fantasy of being a cool, suave secret agent and an adult's realization of how silly we look when we try to be cool and suave. Structurally and formally, "Goldmember" is a mess. What saves it is that Myers possesses in spades the thing that's crucial for comedy: an absolute lack of embarrassment and the willingness to go with his gut instinct. Myers presides over the Powers movies the way Austin presides over a bash at his shag pad: They're open to anyone who wants to cut loose and swing. They have a crazy generosity.

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