Johnny English Strikes Again (2018)

Johnny English Strikes Again (2018)

6/10

Starring

Rowan Atkinson

Ben Miller

Emma Thompson

 

Directed by David Kerr

For me, sitting through another Rowan Atkinson movie is always a delight. His high-class (Mr. Bean-style) packaged stupidity isn’t something I get to see in movies regularly. Over the years, I’ve lost my taste for action spy movies, but spy comedies are always a treat.
That said, this movie wasn’t as good as Johnny English (2003) or Johnny English Reborn (2011), but it still had the barrel of laughs I needed.

Emma Thompson will forever be an amazing actress to behold on screen. In this movie, she plays the prime minister. Her character is just as silly as English, but not in the same stupid way. English, as always, is ahead of himself, and thanks to some well-timed errors, he ends up saving the day.

Back to make sure English does what’s expected of him is the character Bough (Ben Miller). As usual, the world is in trouble—when I say the world, I mean the UK—and there’s nobody left to save the day. As we all know, English is an accidental spy and a complete fool. He’s always the last person the British Secret Service calls, and he never misses that call.

This time, the British Secret Service has a problem related to the present age: cyberattacks. They’ve been hacked, and all the names of their agents have been leaked. The attackers continue to cause trouble, and now they have no choice but to recall all the old agents.

In a room with the old agents, English accidentally takes them all out, leaving him as the only one standing. When he’s on the case, he calls for his old colleague Bough, and together they begin investigating, looking for the villain behind the cyber threat.
This trail leads them down a path where English’s stupidity and skills come in handy, even though they’re often a distraction from his actual mission.

Apprehending the man he’s pinpointed as the mastermind behind the crime is a Herculean task because the suspect is popular and a favorite of someone higher up than English.

My criticism of this movie is that they didn’t even attempt to make the plot good enough for a second viewing. The movie is fun to watch, but I can guarantee you won’t be rushing for seconds. The plot is weak, the villain is very annoying, and the movie as a whole is below average.
But like I said, it had the amount of laughs I needed for my day.