Johnny English Strikes Again (2018)
Directed by David Kerr
Disaster strikes when a criminal mastermind reveals the identities of all active undercover agents in Britain. The secret service can now rely on only one man - Johnny English. Currently teaching at a minor prep school, Johnny springs back into action to find the mysterious hacker. For this mission to succeed, he’ll need all of his skills - what few he has - as the man with yesterday’s analogue methods faces off against tomorrow’s digital technology.
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The result is a cheerfully unfunny low-brow affair which simply can’t compare with the many genuinely entertaining James Bond spoofs that seem to crop up every decade or so, such as Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery or the more sublime pleasures of Jean Dujardin in the French OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies.
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.
The “Austin Powers” movies took the same comic theme and ran with it in a far more ticklishly crackpot, laugh-out-loud merry-surreal way.
And that was especially true with it coming on the heels of the far more imaginative and entertaining "Austin Powers" movies that likewise spoofed all things 007 related.
Austin Powers, El súper agente 86 y Johnny English son algunos ejemplos.
The movie wears its James Bond mockery proudly as it rips off its inciting incident directly from Skyfall: a cyber attack on MI7 leaks all the names of current secret agents online jeopardizing national security.
Parents who find the recent action intensity of the Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig Bonds can at least offer this as an alternative to their younger children, which more or less has the elements of the earlier gentler Roger Moore family-friendly films and apes Goldeneye and Skyfall for setting and style.
He is Blighty’s last hope in finding the mastermind hacker but Johnny is an analogue abacus in a digital world, a bit like the broken down Bond Javier Bardem’s baddie sneered at in Skyfall.
At this point, you may be asking yourself, “Isn’t that the plot of Skyfall ?”
It cribs its plot from Skyfall and recasts Quantum of Solace “Bond girl” Olga Kurylenko as a rival Russian spy.
Going analog to fight a digital villain is a plot line in Skyfall, and if the Russian agent who becomes English’s reluctant ally looks familiar, it’s because she’s played by Olga Kurylenko from Quantum of Solace.
Seeing Edward Fox (“The Day of the Jackal”), Michael Gambon (Dumbledore, kids) and the vulpine Charles Dance (“Labyrinth,” “Game of Thrones”) as debonair old men no longer “Licensed to Kill” is a single-scene delight.
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.
Because this Russian (Olga Kurylenko) is close to the supervillain, who just might be power mad tech tycoon Volta (Jake Lacy of “Obvious Child”).
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While Atkinson’s slapstick routines have an undeniably lasting appeal to them, the Johnny English franchise had gone stale even before witty satires such as Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014) and Spy (2015) reinvigorated the genre.