Review of Johnny English Reborn (2011) by Dawdlingpoet — 28 Nov 2021

This is a mildly amusing action/comedy film and a sequel to the original Johnny English film. The comedy is slapstick, thus very much visual based. For anyone who hasn't seen the original 'Johnny English' film, this is like a cheap comedy spoof of a James Bond film. The comedy is pretty basic, you could say childish, such as one scene whereby his swivel chair keeps lowering to the ground and the other characters, trying to hold a serious conversation, have to act like nothing is going on. Johnny tries to come off as cool, calm and sophisticated, while other characters take advantage of his bumbling nature. Most of the plot is fairly thin, although, to be fair, this is definitely the kind of film which is intended to be watched as a bit of entertainment, not to be thoroughly analysed, put it that way. The film has a total running time of an hour and forty minutes, so its a relatively short film, by todays standards and although some of it was a bit cringey, other scenes were so outlandish and made me chuckle, so I can say I found it entertaining.

The musical score is quite good, in that it sounded quite slick, with pieces played during key fight scenes and other tense action scenes, giving it a more authentic James Bond type feel to it, if but momentarily. Character wise, Simon Ambrose (played by Dominic West) probably comes across as the most sophisticated - with charm, charisma and plenty of confidence. Gillian Anderson plays Pamela, the head of MI-7, someone with deep reservations about having to resort to bringing Johnny back, after the disaster that was the result of his last work mission. Rosamund Pike plays Kate Sumner, Johnny's love interest, while Daniel Kaluuya plays Johnny's younger partner, agent Tucker, a rather impressionable and inexperienced spy but still one who seems to foresee Johnny's pratfalls (pardon the corny word-related-pun).

Of course Rowan Atkinson (or Mr. Bean fame) plays the main character, Johnny. His face appears almost rubber-like, with various fast twitchy facial expressions and the like being clearly visible.

This film can be watched without having seen the original film but it does also contain plot elements which relate to the prior film. I have seen the original film but that was numerous years ago, yet I felt I had a decent understanding of roughly what was what. The story is pretty silly, well obviously most of the film is quite silly but then it is primarily a comedy, with action scenes/elements to it. As a parody spy film, which is the other fairly obvious genre I'd classify this under, its not too bad. As daft and unbelievable as the plot certainly is, I still felt quite tense at times and was keen to keep watching to see how the story panned out, what became of certain characters and the like. This film features some impressive panoramic shots, so its worth seeing on a big screen I reckon. There are some fast paced chase scenes which I quite enjoyed too. I'd say that generally speaking the plot pace is fairly slow, although it certainly does speed up more towards the end.

A part of me felt that there was a slightly stereotyped element to the characters, in as much as the mastermind villain being an English character (not Johnny but I won't say who) and another of the baddies is a Chinese lady, who reminded me of a character from a James Bond film. Still, it is a fairly watchable, if unmemorable and cliched film. I think it depends on your sense of humour and how much you tend to (prefer to?) analyse films, plus whether your primarily looking for a decent drama or thriller film, compared to more of a parody comedy based action film - obviously if its the former then your unlikely to think much of it but this was never intended to be a serious spy film, I'm pretty sured it wasn't marketed as such, so it'd be unfair to judge it as one (in my opinion).

No, I don't think I'd specifically recommend this film - its amusing and somewhat entertaining but it certainly isn't particularly memorable and neither does it have a great plot. The slapstick comedy is amusing and I felt fairly engrossed in it, in as far as wanting to see what the outcome was for certain people and to see how ludicrous the plot ended up being. If you don't take it seriously and are just looking for an easy watch to pass the time, then you could do worse than this but there are both better and worse films around.