REVIEW: Johnny English Strikes Again a surprisingly bearable third try for funnyman Rowan Atkinson
JOHNNY English Strikes Again is the third in a mostly dreadful series. But in a miraculous development akin to curing the common cold, they’ve gone and made a halfway-decent one.
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BRITISH funnyman Rowan Atkinson originally developed his Johnny English persona for a series of credit card ads at the turn of the millennium.
Two terrible films followed in 2003 and 2011, in which Mr English was revealed to be a shoddy combo of a less-than-suave James Bond, a more-talkative Mr Bean and The Pink Panther’s Inspector Clouseau wizzout zee Frahnch accent.
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Teams of analysts, researchers and scientists all over the world are still searching for an explanation as to how these comedy calamities grossed almost half a billion bucks at the box-office.
Now it is time for a third Johnny English flick, and in a miraculous development just south of curing the common cold, they’ve gone and made a halfway-decent one.
The story is a complete bust when it comes to landing laughs on a regular basis. All you need to know going in is that Johnny E is now the only spy in England still active after a hacker blows everyone else’s cover.
The PM (Emma Thompson) has no choice but to give Johnny the best assignments on the books because, well, she has no choice (this angle gets very old, very quickly).
However, if you can make it through the stony silences left in the wake of some fairly feeble jokery, you will notice the physical slapstick set pieces in Johnny English Strikes Again are actually executed with genuine skill and creativity.
Atkinson’s handling of a lengthy scene where a virtual-reality tour of a criminal hide-out accidentally takes Johnny on to the streets of London makes great use of a talent we haven’t seen in quite some time.
JOHNNY ENGLISH STRIKES AGAIN (PG)
Rating: Two and a half stars (2.5 out of 5)
Director: David Kerr (feature debut)
Starring: Rowan Atkinson, Olga Kurylenko, Emma Thompson, Jake Lacy, Ben Miller.
The third time is (finally) a charm
Originally published as REVIEW: Johnny English Strikes Again a surprisingly bearable third try for funnyman Rowan Atkinson