Austin Powers and its sequels weren’t the first to spoof James Bond, nor will they likely be the last, if the ridiculous nature of XXX is any indication – even if the spoofing is unintentional. Sean Connery was still sipping martinis onscreen when a secret agent named Flint (James Coburn) came along to yuck things up in Our Man Flint. Yuck is an appropriate reaction for its sequel, In Like Flint, a clumsy, bland and far too subtle satire of the spy genre.
With the U.S. President kidnapped and a group of female beauty salon owners vying to take over the world, the suave Flint is sent in to save the day. Going undercover like only a Hollywood super spy can, Flint hides himself under such guises as a ballet dancer and a Cuban militant to unravel the mystery. Okay, watching Coburn prance about doing ballet is funny. I’ll give director Gordon Douglas that much, but little else. Maybe it’s the fact that In Like Flint was made way back in the 1960s, but the jokes – if there are any – didn’t have me laughing. Perhaps they’re dated or they just flew right over me, but then the whole argument of subtlety would come into play. What’s a joke if nobody gets it? Besides being a bad joke, the answer is much like the saying about trees falling in an empty forest and what sound it makes. Both insinuate a lack of reaction, and that’s no fun.
Watching Coburn makes me wish he’d opted instead for a monster role in a B-horror flick. He’d make a great Frankenstein, not only because of his chiselled smirk and strong face, but also by the way he stumbles through as Flint. There’s little playfulness in his shtick and he’s too smart to play the ignorant nincompoop. Stuck in a nightmarish in-between, he works as neither a suave lady’s man, nor a bumbling spy, the two ends required to make a spoof such as this work.
There are points during this movie where I want to laugh, but I’m not at all sure I was supposed to do so. Most of this unintentional hilarity comes from the twisted 1960s ideology behind women trying to take over the world. Some of the men’s speeches are rather scary if taken in the context of decades later. It’s overtly male chauvinist to the degree that I was laughing at their stupidity. It is so stupid, in fact, that I was hoping that it was all part of the satire, and to a degree I think it is. But the actions that back up the words also support the notion that the filmmakers might have been moderately serious.
I can’t say what I might have thought about In Like Flint if I’d been around to see it upon its original release, but today it’s plain old out of whack. The jokes don’t work anymore, except for those that are timeless – such as a Frankenstein-like man trying to get information on a case while pirouetting and prancing about before an audience. That’s the sort of cheap and pointless laughs I was hoping for with In Like Flint, but alas there are far too few to matter.
