Johnny English

It was always going to be a struggle for this James Bond spoof. The Austin Powers franchise has more than used up every possible sight gag and double entendre, so material was inevitably going to be thin on the ground for this attempt to expand the inept secret-agent character that Rowan Atkinson essayed in Barclaycard commercials. While Johnny English does differentiate itself from the farcical Carnaby Street antics of Mike Myers’ creation, the results can only make one wonder why the producers didn’t just run with a feature-length version of the Power-City ads instead.

The movie sees ineffectual intelligence operative Johnny English (Atkinson) investigating a nefarious plot to dethrone the Queen. At the centre of this fiendish scheme is Pascal Sauvage (John Malkovich – for shame), a “flouncy Frenchman” prone to “Boo Hiss”-inducing pronouncements such as “Ze aptly named English iz a fool”, and flanked by evil hencemen with German accents that wouldn’t cut it in ’Allo, ’Allo .

Given that the British have been practising anti-French quips since the Battle of Hastings, one might expect some decent anti-foreigner gags from this scenario, but alas, the best Johnny English can come up with is a dismissal of Malkovich’s character as a ponce. That, and more mentions of the word “bottom” than one could expect from the Tory Party conference’s official dominatrix, is what passes for humour.

Okay, the film is very family orientated, and expects that the audience will erupt with laughter at the very mention of the word “poo” (which peppers the script almost as frequently as “bottom”), but much more effort could’ve been put into the script, even as a relentlessly puerile exercise.

In fairness, discounting Natalie Imbruglia’s performance (which leaves you wondering how she managed to wrestle with the scripts for Neighbours), the film isn’t quite as awful as Atkinson’s big screen outing as Mr. Bean, and it does have a couple of decent comedy-action sequences. Besides, if Bean is anything to go by, Johnny English will be huge, even if it is more inept than its central character.