Johnny English Reborn (PG) 101 mins **Some franchises owe their existence to Freeview. In 2003, Rowan Atkinson revived the bumbling spy from his sometime credit-card ads for a movie that did solid business, if not quite as much as its predecessor Bean, and thereafter circulated on ITV2, and eventually an hour later if you missed it on ITV2+1. Without filler-dependent digital channels to sustain the brand, Johnny English would most likely have been decommissioned forever. Instead, there’s a sequel, Johnny English Reborn, which proves cannily packaged but not notably funny, only belatedly coming to meet some of the criteria for acceptable PG-rated silliness.
That packaging, as ever in Working Title’s lazier fare, far outweighs any content. Poster-friendly names (Gillian Anderson, Dominic West) pop in for a few lines and a paycheque. English’s attempts to foil a hit on the Chinese PM prompt some parkour in Kowloon, sewing up one overseas market. And Johnny lands a credibility-issuing young sidekick (Daniel Kaluuya), though the pair’s bonding over old David Soul records betrays the input not of comedy hepcats, but middle-aged farts.
Worse, in playing straight, the sequel fluffs the joke. After a Tibetan training prologue – offering a not-unwelcome lampoon of Batman Begins’ po-faced mysticism – Johnny becomes boringly proficient: choppering about and besting Russians on the golf links, Atkinson resembles less an amusing buffoon than a greying bank manager getting paid to negotiate a midlife crisis. He presumably did it to help meet the premiums on those sports cars he’s been writing off, but no-one need pay to see Reborn in cinemas: it’ll turn up on ITV2 soon enough, and then again on ITV2+1 if you miss it.
Johnny English Reborn is in cinemas nationwide.
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