Johnny English Review:

THE FILM
After all the top spies at MI7 are eliminated it is down to the disaster prone Johnny English (Rowan Atkinson) to investigate a plot to steal the Crown Jewels. With his trusty sidekick Bough (Ben Miller) and army candy in the form of undercover agent Lorna Campbell (Natalie Imbruglia) the trail leads to millionaire Frenchman Patrick Savauge (John Malkovich) who discovers he is next in line to the British throne if the current royal family are disposed of…

Based on Atkinson’s old Barclay card ads, Johnny English attempts cash in on the recent rash of Bond spoofs and spy capers but like the adverts the gags raise a smile at first before losing their charm after the hundredth time. I mean how many ways can the guy’s gun fall apart? It’s clear that the makers had a string of gags on paper and needed a very loose structure to hang them on with Atkinson as the centre of attention. While he reprises parts of the Bean movie, pulling faces and dancing in front of mirrors, the comedian does a great job of being amusing throughout proceedings. Just putting Atkinson in a balaclava and black jump suite is enough to get a laugh and it’s clear he is a natural at this sort of thing. So the film suffers when he’s not around and when you have Malkovich humiliating himself with the most outrageous French accent ever put to film and Imbruglia just being plain boring the action begins to drag and when the running time is a very lean hour and twenty minutes it’s not a good sign.

Johnny English has a great deal in common with another British comedy, The Parole Officer. Both are simple star vehicles that unfortunately prove once again that either our comedians don’t have the mileage on the big screen or that UK filmmakers operate with the blind premise that sticking them up there with no decent story or support will mean they’ll just ‘be funny’. Here it works for the most part but the gags are forgettable and fairly childish plus, incidentally, Ben Miller pops up for support in both movies and is once again amazingly underused. He has a great chemistry with Atkinson and a couple of scenes demonstrate this before there is a ludicrous romantic device thrown in where suddenly Imbruglia likes the hero for no apparent reason.

For family audiences this will provide a brief distraction but for many it will prove an exercise in digging up old gags from the Naked Gun movies and putting them in an Austin Martin. How many times did we see Detective Frank Drebin assault famous members of the monarchy? That’s right, too many and if UK films still think that shamelessly antagonising French/English relations is really funny then this marks another step back in the countries comedy output.

EXTRAS
The Making of Johnny English documentary runs in at about 25 minutes and is a fairly informative look at the film’s shooting. There are cast and crew interviews although rather tellingly John Malkovich has stayed well clear and there are details on each of the major action scenes. So you get a 3D run through of the car chase, parachute work and packs of explosives that rise this slightly above the usual made for TV docs that merely market the movie.

The observation test presents you with 5 scenes and then asks you questions to unlock the deleted scenes but don’t panic, they’re pretty straightforward. The deleted scenes themselves offer a couple more gags but unfortunately more of Malkovich embarrassing himself in an unused subplot involving Atkinson over egging it as another character, someone else who is in line for the throne.

Also hastily stuffed into this thin package are some character profiles probably done by the work experience student; Johnny English has a black belt in origami, hilarious! Put the disc into your computer and you get some more extras, links to the sites, downloads, more games, nothing to blow your sock off really.

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