My son loved it enough to see it twice in a week. One of his friends thought it was the funniest film he had ever seen. It seems to have been a real hit with twelve-year-old boys, and I guess you cannot underestimate a good visual joke at the start involving male genitals. This amounts to Rowan Atkinson (English), in a Tibetan monastery coming to terms with past misdemeanours, making lots of silly facial expressions as he drags around an unfeasibly large boulder tied between his legs (you can imagine). “Watch this, it is so funny,” my son said with genuine enthusiasm. I was less impressed.
After five years in the Intelligence wilderness, having taken his eye off the ball in Mozambique, Johnny English is recalled to MI7. Things have changed in his absence. British Intelligence has been re-branded as Toshiba British Intelligence. Apparently chauvinism, guns and fast cars are all on their way out and the service now has its own very helpful website (spying for you.com) and hands out health and safety leaflets! There is a woman in charge of the section. Gillian Anderson is Pamela Thornton, code name Pegasus. She tells English, “you made a laughing stock out of this service once, not on my watch.” Queue one cock- up after another…
This is an all-star cast to attract big audiences; I assume it is not aimed exclusively at 12-year-olds. Richard Schiff from the West Wing plays CIA Agent Titus Fisher, the brilliant Dominic West from The Wire is fellow spy, Simon Ambrose, and the beautiful Rosamund Pike plays behavioural psychologist, Kate Sumner, intrigued by Johnny’s random behaviour and the unlikely love interest. Basically the plot is simple, a group called Vortex is out to kill the Chinese premier. This is a group that killed the president of Mozambique while Johnny, as head of security, was in a Jacuzzi with a half naked woman. The group includes an M17 spy. Who is the traitor in their ranks? It doesn’t take long for Johnny’s sidekick, Agent Tucker (played by Daniel Kaluuya), and the audience to work it out, but predictably it takes our super bungling anti-hero a bit longer.
There are some amusing moments in the film, a few potentially good visual gags that never quite live up to expectations and some that do. Johnny saying that flying a helicopter is “just like riding a bike” could have turned out to be funnier. But I did smile when he has to bring it down to street level to read the road signs and says, “Let’s follow the A1328, there’s bound to be a hospital in Dingham.” Cue a sing-along to David Soul bonding moment with his assistant that wasn’t bad. The car chase down the Mall, with Johnny in a souped-up wheel chair with three speeds: Fast, V Fast and F Fast, was also rather good.
Slapstick is enjoyable on one level and this is very much humour on one level. Rowan Atkinson doesn’t seem to be sure if he is Spiderman, Mr Bean or Inspector Clouseau. He eats a voice-changing lozenge, chases an assassin up, down and across buildings in Hong Kong and then on a yacht, cheered on by drunken British tourists, as he tells his assailant, “You have met your matchstick.” He attacks his boss’ mother, whom he mistakes for a Chinese assassin disguised as a cleaning woman. He manages to retrieve a vital bit of evidence and then lose it again. And the plot also involves a drug that makes you manic. You can see why a 12-year-old would find it funny.
Overall, this is watchable but pretty unimpressive. The first one was more than enough for me and probably didn’t need a sequel. However, kids of a certain age, especially boys, will probably enjoy it, or so the evidence would seem to suggest!
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