Atkinson might want to shtick to silence
Emma Thompson has a sharper comic edge than Rowan Atkinson in Johnny English Strikes Again, Peter Howell writes.
Johnny English Strikes Again
★★(out of 4) Starring Rowan Atkinson, Emma Thompson, Ben Miller, Olga Kurylenko and Jake Lacy. Directed by David Kerr. Opens Friday at theatres everywhere. 88 minutes. STC
If there’s one good thing that can be said about Rowan Atkinson’s Johnny English character, his predictable 007 parody, it’s that he doesn’t go back to the well too often. Johnny English Strikes Again is just the third movie in 15 years for this franchise, two fewer than the real James Bond series in roughly the same length of time.
It’s laudable restraint for a film and series that otherwise seems determined to wear the viewer down with moronic shtick. Atkinson, director David Kerr and screenwriter William Davies are content to refry the same soggy beans — and Atkinson’s earlier Mr. Bean — with a series of blunders and pratfalls that are first telegraphed and then
tediously executed.
A small flame left unattended will turn into a conflagration. An olive carelessly tossed will send a victim skidding. A warning about the dangers of a pen bomb — stolen from the original Barclaycard ad campaign that spawned the franchise — will lead to the pen being fumbled and the bomb exploding. Shake, don’t stir, repeat.
These slapstick mishaps are usually preceded by a smirking remark by Johnny, who is too arrogant and stupid to realize that he’s not the sharpest tool in the shed of Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Everybody else gets it: “What is wrong with you?” asks Emma Thompson as this film’s prime minister, the first female one in the series. Thompson’s put-upon PM has a sharper comic edge than Atkinson’s dull Johnny. She’s had it up to here with idiots — we can sympathize — and she’s in no mood for tea: “Vodka tonic: no ice, no tonic,” she snaps at an aide.
But Johnny’s not just stupid; he’s also an old-school analog guy who eschews the use of
smartphones. This makes him “impossible” to track and thus the only choice the desperate MI7 spy agency has to take on a digital menace: a diabolical hacker who has tapped into secret networks and rendered all other spies dead, indisposed or simply bored out of their minds.
There’s zero suspense about who the hacker is: a smarmy American dot-com billionaire played by Jake Lacy ( Carol), who wants to mess around with traffic lights and air traffic controls as he plots to take over the internet, or something like that.
Johnny’s on the spot, aided by his amiable sidekick Bough (Ben Miller), returning from the original Johnny English. A real Bond girl, Olga Kurylenko ( Quantum of Solace), plays a Russian agent, whose smart-
phone rings to Boney M’s “Rasputin” (I actually laughed at that). She isn’t given much to do in a script that riffs on tired 007 tropes.
It occurs to me that Johnny English might be funnier if Atkinson played Johnny silently, the way he used to do mischievous Mr. Bean, the role that made him famous. He still possesses the most expressive of faces, especially his eyebrows. The more Johnny talks and boasts, the more irritating he becomes.
If there has to be a fourth Johnny English, I’d love to set him against a real Bond villain such as Goldfinger and hear an exchange like this:
Johnny: Do you expect me to talk?
Goldfinger: No, Mr. English. I expect you to shut up!