Johnny English Reborn (PG) (This review on FilmJuice.com)
Rowan Atkinson returns as bumbling 007-esque hero Johnny English, and to say that the results are mixed would be kind to say the least. While his first adventure wasn’t brilliant, it did have a few decent laughs and though daft it was more than watchable. Reborn on the other hand seems to completely miss what a Johnny English film should be, and is full of gags that are lazy, repetitive and worst of all not funny.
Things kick off with English in exile at some sort of oriental training camp. He returns to London only to find that his beloved MI7 is suffering from a painfully generic case of ‘there’s a mole in the agency’. In one sense maybe plot doesn’t matter quite so much in a spoof movie, after all it’s only there as a framework on which to hang a series of jokes about spy film cliches, right? Wrong. According to the makers of this debacle at least.
Director Oliver Parker frustratingly gives the underdeveloped and boring storyline more attention than the humour and slapstick. If the story was even a tiny bit interesting then that wouldn’t be such a problem, and it would make perfect sense to abandon the comedy elements in favour of plot development... but then it wouldn’t be a spoof at all but kind of pseudo-Bond film in and of itself! Atkinson’s enormous talents go to waste as the film takes itself too seriously.
One flaw the film shares with it’s predecessor is that when it does manage to hit the occasional funny bone, the pace grinds to a standstill, with the edit blatantly waiting for the audience to calm down from a laughing fit before moving on. These moments drag and completely drain even the jokes that do work of their comic energy.
Parker gets it wrong on so many counts that it’s amazing he wasn’t fired. A scene with Johnny’s likeable sidekick Bough was cut because test audiences were disappointed he wasn’t in the rest of the film; which is a great example of how the director has made a movie that simply fails to deliver what it’s audience wants to see. The writing is patchy and the supporting characters hollow. Even Gillian Anderson and Rosamund Pike flounder in their small roles; they have nothing to do besides lend their names to the poster.
A rare positive is the film’s memorable score; composer Ilan Eshkeri is definitely one to listen out for. That, along with a zippy wheelchair chase and a clever gag involving voice changing sum up the film’s pluses. Many of the jokes were used in the trailer, robbing them of impact in the film itself.
Reborn starts and remains stuck in an unfunny and boring limbo between spy adventure and genre spoof. Tiresomely predictable and frequently cringeworthy, clearly things could not only get better after the uneven original. Hopefully now English will go back into exile where sadly, he belongs. This could and should have been so much better.
DVD extras: The Wheelchair Chase, Gag Reel, Deleted/Extended scenes with intro from Director Oliver Park, Feature Commentary.
Blu-ray extras: Same as DVD, plus The English Files - The Making of Johnny English Reborn, Gadgets, English in Hong Kong, Working with Rowan, Pocket BLU.
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