It starts (as some many spy movies do), with the cover of all the spies in MI7 being blown. They are going to have to re-activate some of their retirees. Cut to Johnny English (Atkinson), playing ninja in a darkened wood. But it turns out to be a training exercise - for the school children in his geography class. But he gets the call and must head for London.
There he is one of four spies - the other three are suave, debonair and competent. But English accidentally blows them up, and so he will have to do. First of all, he needs a Boffin - good old Bough, played by Ben Miller (Death in Paradise - one of our favorite series). Then he gets a classic Aston-Martin, and ditches his phone and all digital gadgets. They’ll come in old-school, and the cyber-criminal will never see him coming.
They head, of course, to the south of France, where they meet Olga Kurylenko, zooming around the Corniche. They soon figure out that the villain is the high-tech billionaire Jack Lacey. The Prime Minister, Emma Thompson, has been wooing him to solve England’s problems, not realizing that he’s also causing them. It’s always the tech guy these days - Elon Musk or Jack Dorsey.
There were three basic gag types here:
- Straight physical comedy, of the sort Atkinson excels at.
- Gags with long payoff times, like when someone mentions checking the gas, you know they’ll run out - but you don’t know when
- Tributes to this or that. I noticed this in the last Johnny English movie, but it’s still present here. The geography glass has a touch of Harry Potter, for ex, and the last scene has Atkinson in armor, like in Black Adder.
We laughed all the way through this. Maybe it wasn’t the smartest comedy of the year, and maybe it didn’t break any new ground. But sometimes you just need a well-made, goofy movie.
Also, I should admit that I had a bit of a fever that night. But that doesn’t necessarily make movies seem more funny.
No comments:
Post a Comment