Double uh-oh 7
Atkinson unleashes comic mayhem in ‘Johnny English Strikes Again’
Co-existing in the same (surely magenta shaded) comic netherworld are the “Pink Panther” films, the “Austin Powers” movies and the Johnny English vehicles, starring rubber-faced, verbally gifted English comic actor Rowan Atkinson, aka Black Adder to anybody who knows about such things. In “Johnny English Strikes Again,” the titular character, a first cousin to Atkinson’s Monsieur Hulot-inspired Mr. Bean, is called out of retirement, where he has been teaching children, when a computer hacker reveals all of MI7’s agents’ identities and wreaks havoc with Britain’s roads and trains. Johnny joins other “older” agents played by such venerable British actors as Charles Dance (“Game of Thrones”), Michael Gambon, the second Albus Dumbledore of the “Harry Potter” films, and Edward Fox (“The Day of the Jackal”) for a meeting and accidentally (?) sidelines them all with a stun grenade hidden in a fountain pen. The apoplectic prime minster (Emma Thompson) has reservations about Johnny, who appears out of step with the times, especially when he requests a simple gun from this film’s hipster-high-tech version of the Bond armorer Q , and hijacks a vintage crimson Aston Martin Vantage from the agency’s hybrid-vehicle-filled garage. She has no choice but to send utterly confident Johnny into the fray, even if he has no idea what he is doing. The film combines bits and pieces of the plots of several Bond movies, including “The Spy Who Loved Me.” Johnny and his sidekick Bough (Ben Miller, returning), pronounced Buff, drive
to the south of France, where they meet a beautiful Rus- sian spy named Ophelia (Olga Kurylenko, “Quantum of Solace”). Johnny has ample opportunity to display his utter incompetence as he and Bough get aboard a mystery yacht dubbed the Dot Calm, moored off Cap d’Antibes and into a fortress-like building on the coast to get to the bottom of where and from whom the hacking signal is coming, while simultaneously burning a chic restaurant to the ground. Atkinson, who might be described as the mad love child of Peter Sellers and Monty Python, crashed a McLaren F1 twice in real life, and yet appears to do his own driving in the film. In the course of the action, Johnny deploys an inflatable raft, dons a high-powered exoskeleton, sends a French peloton tumbling to the tarmac and gets lost in London wearing virtual reality headgear. With the exception of a joke about “nerve gas nasal spray,” it’s all very funny. The villain of the piece “could” be the Dr. Evil-like Jason Volta (Jake Lacey of TV’s “Girls”), an Elon Musk-y Silicon Valley tech billionaire with delusions of world-dominating grandeur. BAFTA-nominated director David Kerr keeps the comic balls in the air. Screenwriter William Davies of the glorious “Flushed Away” is a master of both the suggestive and the ridiculous, and his dialogue will have you giggling helplessly. For those of you who cannot resist the proper use and pronunciation of the word “bollocks,” I give you “Johnny English Strikes Again.” He bollocks it up every time.
(“Johnny English Strikes Again” contains suggestive and rude humor and brief nudity.)