Directed by Oliver Parker. Starring Rowan Atkinson, Gillian Anderson, Rosamund Pike, Dominic West, Daniel Kaluuya, Richard Schiff PG cert, general release, 101 min
IS THERE ANY genre quite so redundant as the James Bond pastiche? The makers of the 007 films have had their own tongues planted firmly within cheeks for close to 50 years. All those bad puns? All those absurdly named seductresses? All those lurking underwater bases? Why, it’s almost as if they were aware of the genre’s innate preposterousness.
None of that has stopped the makers of the sphincter-clenchingly awful Johnny English– a film based, lest we forget, on a Barclaycard commercial – from dragging their unfunny hero back for a second outing. Not since Hitler marched into the Sudetenland has a sequel seemed quite so undesirable.
What’s the joke here? Yes, Johnny English is an incompetent agent. But he’s not that incompetent. He can fire a gun more accurately than Inspector Clouseau. He can walk in a straight line without knocking over too many strategically placed ladders. Not so long ago, such modest achievements would, following all that postwar decline, have guaranteed any British civil servant an early knighthood.
In truth, the sole continuing gag is that Sir Johnny (see?) has the head and voice of Rowan Atkinson. With that in mind, the film-makers make sure to introduce plenty of b-words into the dialogue (remember “Bob”) and invent as many opportunities as possible for Rowan to run like an emu with a rectal hernia.
The least terrible comic routines are all third-hand. One wretched sequence involving an apparently defenestrated cat is ripped straight from There's Something About Mary. Johnny's habit of mistaking every innocent old lady for a potential assassin was worn threadbare by the Pink Panther films nearly 40 years ago. The hilarious notion of selling cheaply made, shoddy tat to foreigners was perfected by the Hong Kong plastics industry in the 1960s.
Yes, the true reason for English’s rebirth is that Atkinson – who’s barely conscious here – remains very popular overseas. That arch xenophobe Ian Fleming might have enjoyed the irony.
DONALD CLARKE
