Yet another tragic waste of one of Britain’s greatest clowns

As the James Bond franchise weathers its latest 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, and it’d be a reach to suggest that it is deliberate, given that the films exhibit all the wit of a Tupperware 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 with the same biscuit-tin jingoism. And that remains the joke.

Back from retirement after a hacker outs MI7’S active agents, Johnny pooh-poohs the health and safety briefing that comes with his gun, tosses his government-issue smartphone aside, and wrinkles his nose at his official MI7 Twitter and Instagram profiles. To outsmart a digital criminal mastermind, Johnny’s thinking goes, you have to go staunchly analogue.

Atkinson remains a preposterously gifted physical comedian, and this film is a little better than its predecessors at finding ways to deploy his talent. One scene with a VR headset is a brilliantly devised clowning vignette, but slapstick needs a deadpan camera and, by staging pratfalls like action beats, Johnny English Strikes Again scuttles its comic buoyancy as every gag bobs out of the dock. Few would argue that Johnny English was a good idea to start with, but there is something skin-crawling about watching so much talent relentlessly wasted.