Johnny English Reborn: Pulls Off the Funny

So this weekend I went to see Johnny English Reborn. And you know what? It wasn’t horrible! I know, I know! But it’s true. Somehow this movie was actually pretty good. I mean, it’s definitely true to its form—this isn’t Kubrick we’re talking about. But as far as lame-brained physical comedy/spoof movies go, this one was actually a joy to watch. It’s really quite an amazing feat considering some of the stuff that takes place in the film, but I’ll get into that a little later. First let’s get oriented.

The movie begins in a Tibetan monastery where Johnny English (Rowan Atkinson) is predictably silly amidst all the other appropriately serious Tibetan monks that are there studying/meditating/martial artsing/etc. It definitely has reminiscences of the opening of Ace Ventura 2, but this opening sequence manages to hold its own and actually pulls off the funny despite using jokes that really should be too played out to work.

Johnny English is at this monastery because of a job that went wrong in Mozambique. He was stripped of rank after making MI7 the laughing stock of the intelligence community when he failed to prevent the assassination of an important political leader. It’s been six years since then, and he’s been at the monastery ever since. One day his guru (Togo Igawa) tells him that MI7 needs him. They have an informant who will only talk to Johnny English. “Am I ready?” he asks hopefully. And his guru looks him dead in the eye and says, “No.”

And the plot, set up by this beginning sequence, remains consistent. It remains two dimensional for the entirety of the film. There’s the “don’t cross me,” female boss Pamela (Gillian Anderson), who makes it clear that misogyny will not be tolerated; there’s the genial weapons inventor who supplies all the cool gadgets; there’s Agent Ambrose (Dominic West) who can do no wrong, a veritable golden boy who causes thoughts of inferiority in Johnny; and then there’s the bright young up-and-comer Agent Tucker (Daniel Kaluuya), who shadows Johnny so that he can learn how to operate in the field (and of course, the new guy does everything right while Johnny bumbles his way through while constantly deriding the new guy for his rookie “mistakes”).

The enjoyable brilliance of this film is the fact that even though it is as predictable as possible—and it seems like they tried to throw in as many clichés as they could—it manages freshness in the execution of these predictable moments. It’s not what happened, but how it happened. But even beyond that, it’s how the actors delivered the how of how it happened while what happened is happening. Now, I know that doesn’t really make sense, so let’s just think of it as a familiar joke that is only hilarious when told by a specific person.

It’s hard to find examples that illustrate this because they just don’t sound funny when you repeat them. There’s the moment when Johnny’s contact is supposed to be an Asian man in spectacles and he picks the wrong guy to attempt a secret password conversation. There’s the moment where he accidentally throws his bosses cat out the window and pretends, while his back is to her, that he is still petting it so as not to alarm her. And there’s the moment where his fancy office chair malfunctions, slowly rising and falling during an important meeting—all of these were amusing yet none of them sound amusing.

This film also has a brilliant chase sequence that translates very well. The aging Johnny must retrieve a key from a very agile young man who seems to be a master of parkour with boundless energy. Johnny remembers his guru’s teachings: “You are not young, but with age comes reason.” While the parkour key thief would find himself well at home in a James Bond action sequence, Johnny skips the danger. He opts to walk through the gate doorway as opposed to scaling it, or to take the elevator down from the roof as opposed to shimmying down the rickety scaffolding. It’s a fun and innovative series of moments that quite possibly gained their inspiration from the gun/whip scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark.

A lot of this film can be traced back to Jacques Tati—the brilliant French comedy filmmaker from the 50s. All of his movies dealt with banalities that somehow crossed over into hilariousness due to the way in which they were delivered. This film is definitely a film made to cater to the actors and director. And it’s an interesting thought that one would write something so dorky and trivial precisely so that there is a lot of room for the delivery of the performers.

Not only will this film bring laughter to a wide audience, it will also bring a whole new insight to screenwriters on how the craft can be approached. Sometimes you just have to write a Leslie Neilson movie. We don’t all have to be Charlie freaking Kaufman.