Full Throttle is, for instance, a pretty even match against the Austin Powers movies. We think of an Austin Powers movie as a parody of '60s spy movies but it isn't really like any of them. It's thus different from, say, Mel Brooks's Young Frankenstein (1974), or Airplane! (1980), or Hot Shots! (1991), more purely an occasion for unconnected low jokes and pranks, without reference to specific other movies. Similarly, Full Throttle cashes in on the brand-name '70s TV show and trashes it at the same time, turning itself into a variety show with burlesque low intentions. It shakes itself so loose that the actresses are excused of fidelity to the model or anything except the moment; by contrast Mike Myers has to appear in sketch character in the Austin Powers movies. The jokes in Myers's series are much better than in Full Throttle, and the least together Austin Powers movie is more integrated, but though half the jokes are about sex, Myers as Austin Powers is not sexy (that's part of the joke). The girls in Full Throttle parody the sexy, karate-kicking superagents they're playing, but their sexiness and their personalities are their own. (Diaz shows some flair for sketch acting as a dingdong riding a mechanical bull and as a gum-chewing crime scene investigator with a mullet but I wasn't sorry to see her back in her skimpy civvies.) These movies put you in the range of aesthetics where there's no reason to question your immediate responses: I can recommend Full Throttle because I had as good a time watching it as I had watching Goldmember (2002).

In the long line of slapped-together American vaudeville comedies, Full Throttle, like Goldmember, may not be up to the mark of the Marx Brothers classics made in Hollywood for Paramount, Monkey Business (1931), Horse Feathers (1932), and Duck Soup (1933), the W.C. Fields insanity Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941), Olsen and Johnson's Hellzapoppin' (1941), or the Hope and Crosby crown jewel Road to Utopia (1946), but it's close enough to the other Hope and Crosby Road pictures. It's a casual, rollicking bit of disreputable nonsense.

In addition, it's extremely rare for a movie with female stars to stop making sense in this way. (They're usually brought in as second-string vamps or stooges or, weakest of all, pals--check out Jennifer Aniston's thankless role in Bruce Almighty to see why this is the weakest.) Women perform more than their share of the work of socialization and making sense is part of that. The feminist revenge melodrama Thelma & Louise (1991) claimed to show women rejecting the socialization that made them victims. But in fact the movie followed the dynamics of right-wing vigilante melodrama, and made all-too-much reactionary sense (e.g., the women destroy some poor slob's truck because he made an obscene gesture at them). Girls with guns--enforcing Victorian notions of propriety and killing themselves rather than facing the consequences. Thelma & Louise presents itself as a comedy but it's lethally humorless with respect to its main subject. I heartily prefer Full Throttle: an action picture in which the girls take charge and promiscuously say yes to pleasure.