Brought out of retirement fifteen years after the first JOHNNY ENGLISH/’03 (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/10/johnny-english-2003.html), Rowan Atkinson reprises as the bumbling James Bond-like agent when an unknown computer hacker attacks the entire British spy network online. He’s the only guy left who’s not in the system! Taking orders from Emma Thompson’s P.M., he’s seduced & set up by glam Russian rival Olga Kurylenko and kept from disaster by loyal aide Ben Miller as he hunts for the dastardly programming genius. But while the film’s hit-to-miss gag ratio isn’t much different than it was in the original ENGLISH (No. 2 not seen here), the basic idea now feels tuckered out. A SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER dance parody, really? And only an extended Virtual Reality set piece equals the occasional blissed-out heights of the first film. But if director David Kerr proves no Blake Edwards as comedy technician, like Edwards in THE PINK PANTHER STRIKES AGAIN/’76, he puts out unusually handsome slapstick compositions. (Edwards had cinematographer Harry Waxman; Kerr hired future TÁR/’22 cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister.) Like most Atkinson films, this did much better abroad than Stateside. (Why?) But what makes it all so frustrating is that the film they might have made was sitting right in front of them. Literally. Just watch the prologue with Atkinson now employed as beloved school master teaching Spy Games in the field to his class of kids. That’s the fresh team that should have wound up doing the job. Call it: JOHNNY ENGLISH, SPY MASTER.* (Would have made a great gag for all the WIZARD OF OZ nods they use in the climax by having the students recognize the references from having seen the movie ‘when they were kids.’ Like servicing Atkinson’s ‘Tin Man’ with a dose of oil.) How they missed this obvious idea is a bigger mystery than anything in the plot.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Atkinson is a wildly gifted physical comedian, but he's no dancer; certainly no comic dancer, even harder to pull off, as this routine SNF routine shows.
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *You can see how this idea plays out Western-style with John Wayne forced to run a cattle drive with actual under-age boys in COWBOYS/’72 https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-cowboys-1972.html
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