Rowan
Atkinson was back on the big screen in 2011 with a sequel to the
bungling spy flick Johnny English and as much as I love him, Johnny English: Reborn is below average at best.
Sure,
the first movie was okay, but it wasn’t anything that really blew you
away. The whole bungling spy thing has been done several times, take The Naked Gun for example. Johnny English never really added anything to the genre, it just existed within it.
The
whole premise is essentially: what if James Bond was an idiot? And the
filmmakers pretty much ran with that for the first movie. For the second
they do very much the same thing.
That’s what I didn’t really understand about Johnny English: Reborn,
it adds absolutely nothing to the first movie. It’s just the same sort
of thing: cocky spy thinks he’s all that and it turns out he actually
isn’t all that. It has the same feeling as Steve Martin’s The Pink Panther 2.
The first instalment was a below average but watchable movie, and the
second just carried it on for no apparent reason adding absolutely
nothing but Andy Garcia.
Johnny English: Reborn is
the same as its predecessor. Same sort of humour, same silliness, same
cringeworthy sector of Brit comedy, except this time Bough isn’t in it.
As for
the character himself, as funny as Rowan Atkinson can be, Johnny can get
a bit irritating in that his idiocy goes beyond what’s believable;
after all he is supposed to be a British spy. Can’t blame that on the
cuts surely.
That’s
the thing though, there are some moments in the movie where he’s very
much the Jimmy Bond character he mocks, chasing down baddies, pulling
off stunts in a wheelchair, the usual spy stuff. But then you get
moments where he makes mistakes you wouldn’t expect a five-year-old to
make.
But the most irritating thing about Johnny English: Reborn is
that it’s just too darn predictable. You can see everything coming a
mile off. Every bungling mistake, every stupid remark, every single
idiotic moment is telegrammed straight to you like a predictable bit of
junk-mail through your letterbox.
Add that
predictability to the fact that you know who the baddie is the very
first time they appear on screen and you end up watching a movie you
think you’ve already seen.
And
that’s because you have seen it, back in 2003 when the original came
out, or on ITV2 where it seems to often be on a continuous loop from
dusk til dawn.
This
movie offers little and adds nothing to the original at all. It misses
Ben Miller, though the new sidekick has his own charms about him in
fairness. Overall I’d steer clear unless it’s on ITV2+1 on the same
night as X-Factor.
Final Verdict: 2 Stars. Fun in parts but too predictable and adds nothing to its predecessor.
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