This is one of the nuttiest of the Connery Bond films and one of the most enjoyable. Its narrative is borderline incoherent but that hardly seems to matter to the filmmakers, who are simply using the plot as an excuse for the sort of dumb/surreal gags that the series is famous for. Watching this film you realize that Austin Powers is hardly a parody at all -- just a slight exaggeration of the tongue-in-cheek lunacy of the early Bond films. This one seems to have been made by people on some kind of drug that doesn't exist anymore -- one part Merry Pranksters LSD and two parts Rat Pack bourbon. The film is notable visually for Jill St. John -- unspeakably luscious here, performing increasingly heroic deeds in increasingly fewer clothes . . .
. . . and for images of Las Vegas in 1971 -- from the shocking emptiness of The Strip (Caesars was the only mega-resort in existence at the time) to the wondrous dazzling neon of downtown, on the western end of Fremont Street, before it was turned into a pedestrian mall.
What's more, Jay Sarno, creator of Caesars and Circus-Circus, and one of the true visionaries of modern Las Vegas, plays a bit part as a carnival barker at Circus-Circus:
You can see Circus-Circus in this film exactly as it was when Hunter Thompson first visited it in the early 70s and immortalized its inspired, deranged essence. "The Circus-Circus," he said, "is what the whole hep world would be doing on Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war."