Johnny English Strikes Again (2018)

Johnny English Strikes Again (2018)

IMDB Rating: 6.6 (as on 07.10.2018)

PG | 1h 28min | Action , Adventure , Comedy | 26 October 2018 (USA)

After a cyber-attack reveals the identity of all of the active undercover agents in Britain, Johnny English is forced to come out of retirement to find the mastermind hacker.

Director: David Kerr

Writer: William Davies (screenplay by)

Stars: Olga Kurylenko, Emma Thompson, Rowan Atkinson

 IMDB link

Movie Rating : ★★☆☆☆

Another underpowered Rowan Atkinson spy spoof

Peter Bradshaw

It’s traditional now to look for Brexit significances in any new film with a British slant and that does seem applicable to this revival of the Johnny English action-comedy spoof franchise.

At any rate, the pop-eyed, rubber-faced incompetent Johnny English has had his licence to cock things up renewed for the second time – that name of his signalling more than anything else that he is a broad comic creation designed for non-English-speaking cinemagoing territories.

He is of course the daft secret agent who despite his bizarre pretensions to smoothie glamour has got a little bit of Clouseau, a dash of Mr Bean and a dollop of that chap contributing a single note to the Chariots of Fire theme tune at the London 2012 Olympics opening ceremony. He’s also originally based on the traveller and international man of mystery Atkinson once played in the now forgotten Barclaycard TV ads, leaving chaos in his wake.

There are one or two nice moments in this latest JE outing. I loved Johnny English approaching a helicopter while dressed in a medieval suit of armour and the rotor blades briefly clanging against his helmet. Atkinson’s gift for physical comedy is on display, but the humour feels pretty underpowered and weirdly superfluous, especially as the “serious” film brands like 007 and Mission Impossible themselves now confidently offer comedy as an ingredient. The humour feels as if it is pitched at kids rather than adults, and for me Johnny English’s wacky misadventures aren’t as inventive and focused as Atkinson’s silent-movie gags in the persona of Bean.

Emma Thompson does her very best with this quasi-Teresa-May character but there’s nothing much in the script to work with.

English and Bough begin their odyssey of farcical high-jinks: disguised as waiters, they set fire to a flash French restaurant; they create mayhem smuggling themselves aboard Volta’s luxury yacht; and English triggers pure anarchy as he attempts to use a Virtual Reality headset to familiarise himself with the interior of Volta’s house. All the stops are certainly pulled out for that last sequence, but as amiable and boisterous as it is, there’s quite a bit of kids’ TV about the whole thing.

Pretty moderate stuff. And as with the other Johnny English films I couldn’t help thinking: can’t the British film industry give Rowan Atkinson a role that really does justice to his talent?

 Read Complete review at The Guardian

Movie Rating : ★★☆☆☆

An imbecilic waste of Rowan Atkinson's clowning

 Robbie Collin

As the James Bond franchise weathers its latest existential crisis, trust Johnny English to come creeping back out of the woodwork. Rowan Atkinson’s bumbling secret agent tends to surface whenever his inspiration drops the baton: first in the wake of Die Another Day, as the Pierce Brosnan era collapsed into pantomime, and again a year before Skyfall, as Daniel Craig’s version struggled to find his post-Bourne groove.

Even the inspiration for the Johnny English character, a string of Barclaycard ads that began the early 1990s in which Atkinson played a hapless MI5 agent called Latham, turned up after the dismissal of Timothy Dalton, while the Bond series was on its longest hiatus to date. It would be a reach to suggest that this could be deliberate, given the Johnny English films themselves exhibit all the wit of three Tupperware boxes full of twigs, but the connection does make a weird kind of cosmic sense.

Unlike Bond, Johnny English has no need to change with the times: he can blunder through any crisis the modern world throws at him with the same biscuit-tin jingoism and wholly unwarranted inborn self-confidence that have served him just fine for decades, against all odds.

And that remains the joke even in 2018: in fact, Johnny English Strikes Again makes a virtue of it. Returning from retirement after a shadowy hacker outs the British secret service’s entire network of active agents worldwide, Johnny pooh-poohs the health and safety briefing that now comes with delivery of his service pistol, tosses his government-issue smartphone aside, and wrinkles his nose at the news that he has been furnished with official MI7 Twitter and Instagram accounts.

Atkinson of course remains a preposterously gifted physical comedian, and this new film is a little better than its predecessors at finding ways to effectively deploy his talent. One sequence involving an energy pill and another featuring a virtual reality headset are brilliantly devised clowning vignettes.

But slapstick requires a deadpan camera – the blank, mid-distance gaze of Laurel and Hardy shorts, or Jacques Tati films, or the Mr Bean TV series – and by staging and shooting many of its pratfalls like action beats, Johnny English Strikes Again repeatedly scuttles its own comic buoyancy as its gags bob out of dock.

The nonphysical jokes betray an uncertainty around who the film is actually for: it’s hard to imagine the anti-technology material striking much of a chord with viewers under the age of 40, while a skit in which Johnny irritably fires a tear gas missile from his Aston Martin at a group of cyclists blocking the road is like something out of Clarkson-era Top Gear.

On his day Atkinson can be as great as Tati, and I say that as a Tati diehard. But there is an airy complacency to his film work, up to and including this, that is the opposite of the nanoscopic perfectionism that was Tati’s trademark. Few would argue Johnny English was a good idea to start with, but there is something skin-crawling about watching so much talent relentlessly wasted.

 Read complete review at The Telegraph