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Johnny English Strikes Again review: an imbecilic waste of Rowan Atkinson's clowning

Rowan Atkinson in Johnny English Strikes Again
Rowan Atkinson in Johnny English Strikes Again

Dir: David Kerr; Starring: Rowan Atkinson, Ben Miller, Olga Kurylenko, Emma Thompson, Jake Lacy. PG cert, 89 mins

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. 

To outsmart a digital criminal mastermind, Johnny’s thinking goes, you have to remain staunchly analogue. So as more hacking brings chaos to the UK’s road and rail networks, and Emma Thompson’s gently Theresa May-baiting Prime Minister frets in Downing Street, Johnny and sidekick Bough (Ben Miller) follow a trail of clues to an evil Silicon Valley billionaire (Jake Lacy), who has been engineering the havoc in order to later alleviate it via a lucrative series of public-private partnerships.

As the mission wears on, the British state finds an ally in a poison-packing Russian secret agent played by Olga Kurylenko – a development which can’t help but feel imbecilic, albeit accidentally so, in these fraught, post-Skripal times. Kurylenko is here solely to bring some 007 gold dust and scoop-necked sex appeal (she was the Bond Girl in Quantum of Solace) to a series whose original installment, let’s not forget, was scripted by the long-serving Bond writing duo Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, now plugging away on film 25.

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.

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