The latest installment in the wildly popular Austin Powers series opened this weekend and pulled in over $70 million at the box office.  The new film, Austin Powers in Goldmember, is the third film of the series and is so similar to the first two films that you need to see which babe Austin is drooling over to tell for sure which movie you are watching.  It was Elizabeth Hurley in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery,  Heather Graham in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, and Beyoncé Knowles in Austin Powers in Goldmember.  The title of the movie is another great one.  I still believe that the title of the second movie was allowed only because Americans don't know what the verb, to shag, means.  As usual, Mike Myers plays most of the characters including Austin Powers, Dr. Evil and Fat Bastard.  He also plays Goldmember, a new nemesis from Holland. More on this later. In  Austin Powers in Goldmember, Dr. Evil and Mini-Me are convicted by the World Court but have soon escaped from prison. Their plan this time is to use their Time Machine to bring Goldmember back from 1975 and then build a tractor beam to bring a solid-gold asteroid to Earth.  Meanwhile, Austin's father Nigel (Michael Caine) is kidnapped and taken back to 1975.  All this time travel is unnecessary but then so is the whole plot.  It is all a vehicle for Mike Myers to trot out the same dumb sex and bathroom jokes over and over again.  All this should be getting pretty tired by now but for some reason it isn't.  One reason is the lack of cynicism and nastiness in the humor. With one exception that is.  For some reason, Myers decided that some fairly nasty jokes about the Dutch and the Belgians would be funny.  I guess he thought these two countries are so innocuous that these jokes wouldn't be considered racist.  These are definitely the worst insults hurled at the Belgians since  since Monty Python called them, ``The Phlegms" and ``The Sprouts."

      The regular cast of characters, not played by Mike Myers, returns including Number Two (Robert Wagner), Scott Evil (Seth Green), and Mini-Me (Verne Troyer).  I must admit that I do love Mini-Me.  Added to the cast are Austin's girlfriend from 1975, Foxy Cleopatra, played by Beyoncé Knowles of Destiny's Child.  She is a bit of a disappointment after Hurley and Graham who could actually act.  The big addition to the cast is Michael Caine who plays Austin's father.  This casting was inspired since Austin Powers has some of its roots, including Austin's glasses, in the Harry Palmer character of The Ipcress File.  Unfortunately, even though I love Michael Caine, he is horribly wasted here.  He's barely onscreen and takes part in some of Austin Powers in Goldmember's unfunniest moments.

     The first 10 minutes of Austin Powers in Goldmember are hilarious.  I won't spoil it for you but it's great.  If the movie had ended then, I would have given it .  As it is, the number of bottles dropped off a bit by the time the movie actually ended.  A whole bottle was lost due the presence once again of Fat Bastard, showing that Mike Myers' ability to gross out the audience is still unparalleled.  That being said, the movie is funny and entertaining although I did get a short nap in the middle without missing anything.  Mike Myers' kind of humor is hit or miss but he knows what he's doing.  There are definitely more hits than misses.