AUSTIN POWERS: THE SPY WHO SHAGGED ME (45)

Directed by: Jay Roach

Starring: Mike Myers, Heather Graham, Rob Lowe, Seth Green

The Pitch: Dr. Evil time-travels back to the Swinging 60s, aiming to steal Austin Powers' mojo.

Theo Sez: "Do I make you horny, baby?" ; "Oh, behave!" ; "Ten beeellion dullars!" ; are we giggling helplessly yet? That's pretty much the modus operandi of this crude, tatty sequel, mostly content to repeat ("recycle" would be glorifying it) the original's jokes - the one about Mustafa the indestructible henchman, the one about Dr. Evil and his gang laughing in unison, the one about Austin making awful puns after a baddie's death, and so on. Myers' peculiar genius lies in making you wonder, however fleetingly, whether he might actually be poking fun at crude, tatty sequels rather than making one - but the film's laziness is increasingly apparent, above all in its pop-culture name-dropping, the worst kind of cannibalistic humour, getting easy laughs from audiences' smug media-literacy : hard to decide what's more painful, watching Dr. Evil demean himself by reciting a list of 90s catch-phrases or watching a bewildered non-American audience strain to 'get' the references. Nine-tenths of it is lame, annoying or repellent, the remainder unlike anything else in comedy right now : a Carry On kind of humour, steeped in old-fashioned naughtiness, double entendres and complicated smut-avoidance - the old gag about Austin's privates camouflaged by an array of ever-more-unlikely objects, or a new one in which a string of people say what his phallic rocket-ship looks like without actually saying it. The latter is the year's funniest riff, and looked for a while like it might upgrade the rating all by itself ; then it stupidly - but typically - got repeated just before the final credits, and the magic was gone.