FILM OF THE WEEK
Johnny English Strikes Again Cert: PG; Now showing
If taken as a kids’ film, Johnny English Strikes Again, the third film in the English spy spoof series, works fine. Thin on plot, not too long, no bad language and with enough silly jokes and visual gags to keep the average mediumage child amused... I just don’t think it was intended as such.
Accident prone, old-school MI7 spy Johnny English (Rowan Atkinson) has been retired from active service and now whiles away the hours teaching history in a boarding school — where, rather than focus on the Battle of Hastings, he teaches his pupils how to be spies. When a cyber attack reveals the identity of all current operatives, MI7 is forced to look to their retired staff to find out who is behind the attack. Re-enter Johnny English. He dusts off his old side-kick Bough (Ben Miller) and, eschewing all modern tech because he is a dinosaur, though Bough explains it as a cunning ploy to be untrackable, the lads go to the South of France where they come across Ophelia (Olga Kurylenko).
Dinosaur Johnny feels sure a nice girl like that couldn’t possibly be a spy, but through her they get to tech giant Jason (Jake Lacy), someone British Prime Minister (Emma Thompson) is courting for her first G12 summit. And to whom she turns for help with the increasingly crippling cyber attacks.
At one point English disguises himself as a French waiter, the echoes of Clouseau merely highlight how far this comedy is from Peter Sellers’s classics.
There’s a scene, more Mr Bean than Johnny English, where A Virtual Reality exercise goes wrong and that works. But more often than not it is just silly and harmless.