In a sentenceAtkinson’s face is funnier than anything the script gives it to do
Johnny English (Rowan Atkinson) has been hiding in a Tibetan monastery, learning to take a kick to the groin without flinching, since a mission in Mozambique went badly. MI7, now run by Pamela (Gillian Anderson) and carrying a corporate sponsor’s name on its wall, calls him back: a former CIA man, Fisher (Richard Schiff), will talk to nobody else. English is given a junior agent, Tucker (Daniel Kaluuya), and sent to Hong Kong, where Fisher tells him of a group called Vortex and a threat to the Chinese premier at forthcoming talks. Back in London he meets the department’s behavioural psychologist, Kate (Rosamund Pike), and its star agent, Ambrose (Dominic West), who is everything English is not. Quartermain (Tim McInnerny) supplies the gadgets.
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Rowan Atkinson is as exact as he has ever been, and two scenes, a chair and a rooftop, earn their place. The film around him is slow, mild and uninterested in its own cast, and settles for being a vehicle.
Eight years after the first Johnny English, Rowan Atkinson puts the suit back on, and the question for anyone considering the sequel is whether that is enough. Oliver Parker directs from a screenplay by Hamish McColl, with William Davies also credited as writer, and the plan is plain: a Bond picture for children, with Atkinson’s body doing the work the gadgets usually do. The plan is sound. Atkinson is as precise as he has ever been. The film around him is mild, slow in the middle and short of ideas, and it seems content with that.
The best scene is also the cheapest. English is summoned to see Pamela (Gillian Anderson), the head of MI7, and sits in a chair whose height he cannot control. He sinks, he rises, he tries to look like a man receiving a briefing. There are no effects and no stunt, only a lever, Atkinson’s face and his refusal to admit that anything is happening. We laughed out loud, more than once, and felt a little foolish about it afterwards, because we knew exactly what was being done to us and it worked anyway.
The rooftop chase in Hong Kong is the other reason to be here. The man English is after goes over walls and across gaps, and English, having looked at the drop, takes the stairs and the lift and arrives ahead of him with his breath intact. Guy Bensley cuts between the two so that the joke lands on the cut, and Ilan Eshkeri’s score gives the runner the full brass and gives English nothing at all. It is a good gag because it is about character: this is a man who is wrong about most things and right about saving his breath.
Between those scenes the film sits down. McColl’s script moves English from Tibet to London to Hong Kong and onward by caption, and the plot, about a group called Vortex and a threat to the Chinese premier, is a line of places with a gag waiting at each one. The middle forty minutes are the problem. We were bored, and then irritated about it, because the cast on hand is far better than what they are asked to do. Rosamund Pike plays Kate, a behavioural psychologist who warms to English for reasons the script never finds time to supply. Dominic West’s Ambrose is smooth and smug and nothing more. Anderson gets the driest lines and delivers them as if she knows the consensus, and Daniel Kaluuya, as the junior agent Tucker, is quick and likeable and has one good scene for every three he spends standing at the back.
The craft is clean to the point of blandness. Danny Cohen lights everything evenly and brightly, so that Hong Kong looks like a brochure and MI7 looks like an advert, which is, after all, where this character began. Jim Clay’s production design gives the service a glass headquarters with a sponsor’s name on the wall, a joke made in the first reel that then simply becomes the office. Eshkeri’s Bond pastiche is well done and does not pretend to be anything else. The PG certificate keeps the film away from anything rude, and the gags that remain are the kind a parent will have seen before and a child will not, which is the audience Parker has settled on.
Against Atkinson’s own standard it sits in the middle. The 2003 film was broader and funnier, and the Mr Bean pictures trusted his face to carry whole scenes without a line. Here Parker gives him the face and then keeps cutting away to a plot. Most critics landed on the fence and so have we, with the same reservation: the things that work all belong to one man, and the film never builds anything around him that works on its own.
It runs 101 minutes and earns perhaps a third of them. For a Sunday afternoon with children who have not yet met Rowan Atkinson, that is a fair exchange, and they will remember the chair. For anyone else, keep the remote close, because the good bits do not announce themselves and the rest is quite happy to be skipped.
The reviews lean mixed to negative, and the one thing nearly every critic agrees on is Rowan Atkinson. His timing, his face and his physical comedy are praised even in notices that dislike the film around him, and several reviews name the same moments: a rooftop chase, a wheelchair chase, a gag built on a chair that will not sit at the right height. More than one critic says the simpler the gag, the better it lands.
They part over whether Atkinson is enough. The negative reviews, which outnumber the positive, find the script lazy and the invention thin, and The Guardian argues the slapstick fails to use Atkinson’s talent properly. The spread is wide: Eye for Film finds the film smarter and more fun than expected, while Digital Spy finds it stale and deeply unfunny. Slant, alone, saves its warmth for Gillian Anderson.
Abele finds the film a routine but enjoyable vehicle for Rowan Atkinson’s comic talents. He singles out Atkinson’s precise physical comedy and subtle expressions as the source of its best laughs.
Read the full review →Edwards finds the reprise enjoyable, though its laughs are uneven and the comedy often feels wheezy. He praises Atkinson’s physical performance and says the simpler visual gags work best.
Read the full review →The page identifies this as Mark Adams’s review, but its verdict is unavailable in the accessible text. No specific praise or complaint can be confirmed.
Read the full review →The review text is inaccessible, so its verdict and specific praise or criticism cannot be verified. The available page does not provide enough information to summarize the critic’s assessment.
Read the full review →Rabin finds the sequel hopelessly mild, with only occasional laughs amid weak physical-comedy setpieces. He singles out a chase gag built around Johnny English’s unexpected common sense as the film’s sharpest moment.
Read the full review →Freer finds the film low on ambition but capable of delivering strong laughs. He praises Atkinson’s physical and verbal comedy, while noting the story’s thinness.
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Johnny EnglishThe first outing, broader and sillier, with Atkinson given more room and fewer captions.
OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of SpiesFrance’s idiot agent, played dead straight by Jean Dujardin; sharper about the genre’s vanity.
A Shot in the Dark · not reviewed yetPeter Sellers’s Clouseau at full stretch, the model for every incompetent in a good suit since.
Spy · not reviewed yetMelissa McCarthy’s desk analyst in the field; the gadgets are the joke and the plot works.
Top Secret!Zucker and Abrahams fire gags at the spy picture faster than you can count them.
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