Rowan Atkinson has proven himself in drama (see Netflix’s “Maigret”) but he’s made his widest mark in comedy. Playing the title character in the new episode of the enduring Johnny English franchise, Atkinson deadpans his way through global meltdown. He remains, as ever, indefatigable in the face of catastrophe.
As Johnny English Strikes Again begins, the crack MI7 agent has been put to pasture. He’s teaching spycraft to eager pupils at an exclusive British grade school, running the kids through commando drill as well as how to hold a martini glass at a rakish angle. But when a cyber attack has exposed the identity of every active U.K. agent, English is called from retirement and reteamed with his faithful sidekick, Bough (British straight-man comic Ben Miller), on a mission to the south of France where the villainy appears to originate.
Decidedly old school, English surveys the dull lineup of identical contemporary cars he’s offered for the trip and chooses instead a mothballed red Aston Martin. He’s more astute than he looks: a vintage car without a chip or a GPS will be invisible to a cyber criminal. Handed a smartphone, he dismisses it saying, “I need a weapon, not a box of gobbledygook.” The analogue avenue he travels proves the best route as he pursues his thoroughly wired quarry.
With a face as creased and inexpressive as an old leather shoe, English engages in a comedy routine worthy of Charlie Chaplin or Peter Sellers while impersonating a waiter at a posh French restaurant. He tangles with a seductive Russian agent (Bond girl Olga Kurylenko), but the Russians are only one facet of the game being played. As the cyber criminal shuts down air traffic over Europe, traffic lights in London and keeps a Ferris wheel in perpetual rotation, English begins to suspect that the mastermind is the mediagenic Silicon Valley billionaire Jason Volta (Jake Lacy).
Volta is one of those casually clad tech-wizzes whose promotional videos in front of adoring audiences of sycophants and investors are filled with pronouncements about “delivering change through a few lines of code.” To Volta, the world is nothing but data and he wants to have it all. Britain’s hapless prime minister (Emma Thompson), a Theresa May stand-in, is convinced that Volta embodies the future in all its shiny hope and glory. Volta snickers to himself that “politicians are even more gullible than venture capitalists.”
Johnny English Strikes Again is a consistently funny spy-thriller spoof that also delivers a hilariously apt assessment of a real problem: by linking everything to the web, everything is vulnerable. No matter how high the firewall, someone will scale it. The imperturbable English may be a bungling fool besotted with false ideas of his own charm, but while his foes play with their smartphones and his bosses are duped by dreams of digital utopia, he gets the job done.
