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Johnny English Strikes Again
Adventure, Comedy
An idiot doofus is out to save the dregs of the British Empire while wallowing in unwarranted nostalgia for a past that wasn’t as awesome as he would prefer to think. A bit of anti-Brexit bite (and hence also anti-Trump bite; he’s a symptom of the same rot) gives this cheerfully dumb third-in-the-franchise spy spoof a bit of heft it might otherwise not have. Johnny English (Rowan Atkinson) is called back into service when his fellow agents are outed in a cyberattack, and all that follows is entirely beside the point, except that it allows Atkinson to celebrate male fatuousness as a good thing; this is slightly more amusing here than movies generally presume it to be. Because of the cyberattack, English refuses all modern tech, since a smartphone could be tracked. But the “good old British technology” that Johnny favors—favours—is depicted as laughably outmoded. Retro vintage is nonsense; it is low-tech hilarity, as seen in the electric smartcar–vs.–gas-guzzler Aston Martin chase sequence. Johnny and his preference for old-school is buffoonish. Laugh until you cry
Official Site: www.johnnyenglishmovie.com
Director: David Kerr
Producer: Chris Clark, Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Rowan Atkinson, Raphaël Benoliel, Liza Chasin and William Davies
Cast: Rowan Atkinson, Ben Miller, Emma Thompson, Olga Kurylenko, Jake Lacy, Miranda Hennessy, Adam James, Pippa Bennett-Warner, David Mumeni, Kendra Mei and Michael Gambon
Director: David Kerr
Producer: Chris Clark, Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Rowan Atkinson, Raphaël Benoliel, Liza Chasin and William Davies
Cast: Rowan Atkinson, Ben Miller, Emma Thompson, Olga Kurylenko, Jake Lacy, Miranda Hennessy, Adam James, Pippa Bennett-Warner, David Mumeni, Kendra Mei and Michael Gambon
