Johnny English Strikes Again film review ★★★★★

MI7 has come under a cyber-attack and the agency’s secret agents have been revealed to the world, so they must bring back the spent ones. On some list is Johnny English (Rowan Atkinson), who teams up with his bright-eyed partner from the first film, Bough (Ben Miller), and investigates where the attack came from.

Atkinson is back as the slapstick spoof of a secret agent, who’s grown into an intolerant granddad – spouting some sexist comment or xenophobic reasoning that we’re meant to find funny because he’s of a different generation. He plays this obliviousness well, even if it’s not very funny.

He’s good at scrunching up his face when hearing a woman can be a navy captain, and plays to his strengths as a physical performer by taking to the dancefloor after swallowing a powerful energy pill. But the level of ignorance, especially nowadays, makes his character so much less likeable.

Johnny English Strikes Again is a spoof without energy, with screenwriter William Davies not even bothering to mock spy movie clichés (which is the basis for the series). He’d rather use them like they actually worked.

A few good jokes are squeezed out, though rarely with the spy in the room. Atkinson tries his best to make a half-hearted script funny, succeeding once every 30 minutes, but the third and hopefully last in the series is about as good as the clumsy spy’s intelligence. It’s hard to say why he picked up the script – maybe his paycheck was stapled to the front page.