Đánh giá johnny english strikes again năm 2024

On the evidence, Rowan Atkinson’s secret agent character, Johnny English, has grown slightly less bumbling over the years, and so has the series. “Johnny English Strikes Again” has a few more laughs and far fewer cringes (and stereotypes) than the two films that preceded it.

Plus it knows where to steal from. Watching it is like having a good time by proxy. The title evokes Peter Sellers’s work in “The Pink Panther Strikes Again,” and the moment when Johnny commandeers a student driver’s car is an invitation to rewatch “The Naked Gun,” which deployed a definitive version of that gag three decades ago.

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A preview of the film.

Johnny, who has been working as a schoolteacher, is summoned back into service after a cyberattack exposes Britain’s top agents. Emma Thompson, as the hapless, put-upon prime minister — who bears more than a slight resemblance to Theresa May — adds some welcome dryness to an otherwise very broad movie.

In the two funniest sequences, Atkinson shows off the physical elasticity he honed as Mr. Bean. In one, after mistakenly ingesting a mega-stimulant, he spends a night on the dance floor unwittingly and robotically evading assassination by a Russian spy (the former bond girl Olga Kurylenko). In the other, he takes a virtual reality tour of the home of a Silicon Valley mogul (Jake Lacy, channeling Elon Musk and perhaps a bit of Mark Zuckerberg) — and accidentally strays into the streets of London.

Rowan Atkinson’s Johnny English hasn’t changed a bit in the nearly two decades since he originated in a series of credit card commercials before landing his own spinoff feature. Today, he remains an analog spy in a digital world, equally uncomfortable with smartphones, electric cars, and women in power. Yet rather than engage with the idiot-savant spy’s outmoded beliefs and tactics or examine how his self-professed “old-school” masculinity functions in the midst of a post-Brexit England where the prime minister (Emma Thompson) is female, David Kerr’s lifeless Johnny English Strikes Again simply coasts on the series’s low stakes and bland, outdated spoofing of pre-Daniel Craig-era James Bond plot devices and characterizations.

The film’s juvenile humor is clearly pitched toward kids, but that makes it all the more baffling that the targets of its satire will now only be recognized by those too old to be amused by Johnny English’s simple-minded antics. Opening with the hacking of the British Intelligence agency MI7 and the swift introduction of a Jeff Bezos-like villain, Jason Volta (Jake Lacy), this third entry in the Johnny English series takes an initial stab at relevancy. But these attempts to grapple with the effects of technology on modern politics are quickly thwarted as the paper-thin plot—in which Volta almost instantaneously convinces the PM to store all of England’s top-secret data on his company’s private network—devolves into little more than a smokescreen for a series of loosely connected and uninspired bits of physical humor.

Relying on such arcane gags as prat falls in knight’s armor, fake French accents, and an array of gadget-based explosions, Johnny English Strikes Again seems almost hellbent on aiming for the lowest common denominator at every turn. A brief reprieve offering some choice bits of lunacy comes in the form of a lengthy scene where Johnny tests out virtual reality goggles and accidentally wanders around London accosting innocent bystanders. This sequence injects a much-needed anarchic spirit into a film that’s otherwise paint-by-numbers. So it’s unsurprising that as soon as the scene ends, Atkinson and company quickly return to business as usual with age-old bits where characters slip on fruit or accidentally blow things up.

Atkinson’s unwavering energy, even in the most asinine sequences, is laudable simply for the actor’s sheer commitment. However, the very nature of his character necessitates an adherence to spy-film clichés that not only don’t play to the actor’s strengths, but lead to inconsistencies where Johnny English is suave and proficient in one scene and a bumbling fool the next. It’s as if the filmmakers and Atkinson wanted to make a Mr. Bean film but were forced to repeatedly return to parodying 007 in order to justify Johnny English Strikes Again’s existence. With comedic material this lackluster and unimaginative, though, the restrictions of genre are really the least of the problems.

Score:

Cast: Rowan Atkinson, Olga Kurylenko, Emma Thompson, Charles Dance, Jake Lacy, Michael Gambon, Ben Miller, Miranda Hennessy, Adam James Director: David Kerr Screenwriter: William Davies Distributor: Universal Pictures Running Time: 88 min Rating: PG Year: 2018 Buy: Video, Soundtrack

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