Finch
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AMBERGRIS: 239 Manzikert Avenue, Apartment 525. Two dead bodies lie on a dusty floor. One corpse is...
Goldfinger
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Auric Goldfinger - cruel, clever, and frustratingly careful - is a cheat at Canasta and a crook on a...
Tom Turner (388 KP) rated The Spy Who Came in from the Cold in Books
Apr 30, 2021
I will admit I struggled mid way through, and without knowing why it's all happening it you could find your mind wandering due to lack of action, - there a lot of chapters that are just two people, and often the same two people, talking. However once you get to the final third all of that makes sense and it becomes a masterpiece. I'm going to take a brief break from Le Carre, but be assured - I'm going to return!!
I Sold My Soul For A Sitcom
8.0
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Name – Kendyl Owens Age- 23 Occupation – Super spy/Malcolm in the Middle Fan-Club president ...
Boy From Berlin
10.0
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Berlin, April 1938. One night, eight-year-old Käfer Avigdor uses his specialty toilet-paper roll...
World War 2 Children Middle Grade Hitler Historical Fiction History
Love, Lies and Spies
6.0
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Juliana Telford is not your average nineteenth-century young lady. She’s much more interested in...
retelling regency
The Queen's Accomplice (Maggie Hope Mystery, #6)
7.0
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England, 1942. The Nazis relentless Blitz may have paused, but London s nightly blackouts continue....
The Cheater's Game
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The arrival of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show in London brings trouble. When the sharpshooter who...
Bob Mann (459 KP) rated Johnny English Strikes Again (2018) in Movies
Sep 28, 2021
So it was that 2003’s Johnny English was a refreshing novelty. Roll forwards 15 years (via 2011’s “Johnny English Reborn”) and the concoction needs… you know… actual JOKES.
For “Johnny English Strikes Again” is unfortunately a pretty lame affair.
The Plot
Johnny English (Atkinson) is retired from MI7 and living life as a Geography teacher at a public school. Aside from teaching them about sheep farming in Australia and magma, English delights in teaching his young pupils the tricks of the spy trade: “You’re looking particularly beautiful tonight”, with a twinkle and a vodka martini in hand. “You’re looking particularly beautiful tonight” repeats the class.
But the quiet life of English is about to end, since a cyber-attack has exposed all of MI7’s current agents and the Prime Minister (Emma Thompson) needs to re-hire a retired agent who is currently ‘off the grid’. But noone – friend or foe – is safe when the bumbling English and his faithful helper Bough (Ben Miller) go back into the field.
The Turns
As UK comedy professionals, Atkinson and Miller deliver their English/Bough schtick serviceably enough. The brilliant Emma Thompson though is woefully underused as a straight-woman, being asked to do little more than an exasperated Theresa May impersonation.
If you need a sexy and sophisticated femme fatale for a Bond spoof, what better than a real ex-Bond girl? So the extremely sexy and sophisticated Olga Kurylenko (Camille from “Quantum of Solace”) plays Ophelia Bhuletova, which sounds much funnier when pronounced by Atkinson. And a very good job she does too.
The Review
To emphasise the positive for a moment, the film is suitably glossy, which are table stakes for a spy caper like this or Austin Powers.
But the script by William Davies (who did the previous Johnny Englishes, but nothing much since “Reborn”) doesn’t deliver any real laugh-out-loud moments. My hopes were raised when the “pensioner interviews” happened and Charles Dance, Edward Fox and Michael Gambon turned up. Great, I thought… having the old timers play off Atkinson will be fun. But unfortunately they were nothing but cameos and (although one of the film’s comedy highlights) they came and went in the blink of an eye.
Elsewhere the film relied too much on a few running jokes: ostensibly the need for health and safety in MI7, where guns are rather frowned upon, given their potential to caused injury or worse. A ‘virtual reality’ training mission also delivers smiles but outstays its welcome.
The film is a first-time feature for TV-comedy director David Kerr.
Final thoughts
There are films which are wildly offensive. There are films that are just plain bad. This is neither: it is as Douglas Adams might have described it as “Mostly Harmless”. But to get any more than the rating I have given it, a comedy film has to make me laugh and this one failed miserably. It’s a watchable TV film for a rainy afternoon, but not worth heading out to the cinema to watch.