Metacritic Film

Austin Powers in Goldmember

Starring Mike Myers, Beyoncé Knowles, Michael York, Michael Caine, Seth Green, Eddie Adams, and Robert Wagner

MPAA RATING: PG-13 for sexual innuendo, crude humor and language

New Line Cinema
Comedy
94 minutes | Color
USA
Released In Theaters July 26, 2002

It's been three years since Austin Powers, that swinging international man of mystery, has faced his arch-nemesis, Dr. Evil. But after Dr. Evil and his accomplice Mini Me escape from a maximum-security prison, Austin is called to action once more in this third installment of the highly successful "Austin Powers" movie franchise. (New Line Cinema)

WRITTEN BY
Mike Myers (also characters)
Michael McCullers

DIRECTED BY
Jay Roach

Overall Metascore

This is a weighted, normalized average of all individual scores given by critics, on a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (best).

62 / 100

Critic Reviews

90 Washington Post
Puerile, pitiful, grotesque, offensive, immature, repulsive and, of course, extremely funny.
90 Washington Post
Mike Myers unleashes (or seems to unleash) the entire contents of his comic mind.
90 Slate
Mike Myers is like a rich 12-year-old who rents out F.A.O. Schwartz, upends every toy in under two hours, and brings in strippers. He can get away with this privileged romp because he grooves on what he does in a way that none of his contemporaries -- can comprehend.
88 Charlotte Observer
The funniest, crassest, wildest, most musical, most satirical and most scatological of the Powers trilogy. And you get to watch Britney Spears' head explode. What more could you want?
83 Portland Oregonian
You go into an Austin Powers movie with a big grin on -- or at least you should. The charm of this one is that you leave smiling even more broadly.
80 Salon.com
It's a mess, and a ridiculous golden shower of toilet humor. But Mike Myers' superspy spoof still provides the summer's purest movie delight.
80 The New York Times
Like a giant balloon painted with Day-Glo colors, however, the whole gaudy mess wouldn't inflate without the force of Mr. Myers's comic genius. It's his baby, baby. And after three editions, it's still flying high.
75 Boston Globe
The most consistently funny of the ''Austin Powers'' films.
75 The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Myers's sheer fertility of invention is of a different order, and even if he misses as often as he hits, he's definitely a swinger.
75 San Francisco Chronicle
This summer's comic gem.
75 Entertainment Weekly
Mike Myers and Austin Powers may stick to their old Beatle boots, but they've both come a long way, luvvy. For proof, just look at all the A-list celebrities-I-won't-mention happy to crash the party.
75 New York Daily News
The best way to look at this installment, however, is as musical theater of the absurd. The song-and-dance set pieces are brilliant, including a rap-style "It's a Hard Knock Life" in a prison.
70 New York Magazine
Caine is burlesquing his own iconography and enjoying every minute of it. He hasn't lost his dignity, though; it takes a lot of self-possession to act this blissfully silly. He even looks good with bad teeth.
70 Film Threat Rick Kisonak
Not since the heyday of Fellini, I dare say, has there been such a merrygoround of a movie.
70 Wall Street Journal
Nothing to write home about, though nothing to stay home about either, especially if you're a dyed-in-the-polyester Powers fan.
70 New Times (L.A.)
The movie will leave you smiling forgetfully on the way out, and Myers will have done his job.
67 Austin Chronicle
The latest installment in the Austin Powers series has stopped making much sense at all, but it sure gets its giggle on, and good.
67 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
It's often quite funny (when it's not spinning its wheels in rehashed skits and recycled gags), but when Myers gets his mojo working and his mind out of the toilet, he's capable of better.
63 New York Post
Uneven, self-conscious but often hilarious spoof.
63 ReelViews
In all fairness to the film, it is superior to the disappointing second movie in the series. The comedy is about as low-brow as it can get (at least without treading into R-rated territory).
63 Chicago Tribune
It's a shapeless, derivative-but-funny show with another loony parody plot about super-villain Dr. Evil.
63 Baltimore Sun
Austin does have a psychedelic buoyancy and Dr. Evil an addle-pated sadistic goofiness that are original and engaging, but Myers doesn't build on their best stuff. That's where a real plot would help.
60 Chicago Reader Hank Sartin
With the jokes coming about one per second, you're bound to find something to laugh at. I found myself laughing a lot--even as I began to feel the whole thing wearing thin.
60 Variety
A picture that, even more than the previous two, feels like a bunch of gags tossed together. The laughs are here, to be sure, although even some of the best of them are retreads and the Swinging '60s recycling act is now feeling a bit past its zeitgeist prime.
50 TV Guide
Casting Caine as Austin's father is a stroke of pure genius.
50 Los Angeles Times
The only thing that won't make you laugh, unless you've got a 12-year-old's sense of humor, is the film's tireless parade of gross-out gags and scatological verbal jests. Myers gets a charge out of this material--it wouldn't be here if he didn't--but so much of it is so tedious it's difficult to believe an adult actually sat down and wrote it.
50 Miami Herald
The uneven Goldmember seems to take a big step toward the extremely juvenile, with more scatological and fewer sex jokes
50 LA Weekly
The laugh always comes first, and Myers' puppy-dog tenacity to that cast-iron tenet of low comedy, disarming and even somewhat charming in the first film, now has an air of careerist desperation about it.
50 Chicago Sun-Times
A step or two down from the first and second, but it has some very funny moments, and maybe that is all we hope for.
50 Rolling Stone
The gifted Myers lets his once and (I hope) future shag king get lost in an elephantine Hollywood franchise. The first time was the charm, baby.
40 Village Voice
Star/writer Mike Myers and director Jay Roach struggle visibly with exhausted possibilities and diminishing returns.
38 Philadelphia Inquirer
To paraphrase one of the few memorable lines in the movie, "Even stink would say this stinks."
25 Christian Science Monitor
Goldmember comes after years of escalating vulgarity have thrown the need for caution -- and cleverness -- out of fashion.
20 The Onion (A.V. Club)
Myers returns as his menagerie of repulsive characters, but this time, his frantic mugging feels more like an insipid parlor trick than ever.

CLOSE THIS WINDOW

©2009 CNET Networks Inc. All rights reserved.