Johnny English Reborn
Director: Oliver Parker
Cast: Rowan Atkinson, Gillian Anderson, Rosamund Pike
Rated: PG
Running time: 101 minutes
In poker it's called a tell - that "thing" you do that gives your thoughts away. But tells aren't just in poker. For instance, when I'm watching a movie that makes me want to scream at the top of my lungs and burn the place to the ground before anyone else has to sit through this inhumane rubbish yeah, when that happens, I simply remove my glasses and give my eyes a good squeeze. More often than not, that helps. However, halfway through Johnny English, I feared I was going to rub my eyelids off.
Remember when Rowan Atkinson was a beacon of comedic light? Sigh well, now he's doing ball-kicking jokes for cash. Here, Rowan reprises his role as the sub-par bond spoof Johnny English. The film starts in the Far East, where English tries to regain composure after a mission gone wrong. He is recruited back to service and gets mixed up in an even more secret organization that wants to kill the Chinese premier. On the plus side, it is nice to see Gillian Anderson getting some work as the bumbler's boss lady whose job it is to simply apologize a lot.
When it gets right down to it, this film makes me miss Leslie Neilson and Peter Sellers. That and what can you say about a comedy where the audience did not emit one single auditory laugh the entire time? Not one. I did, however, hear some snoring at the end and was very jealous. Yes, it's that good.
