Johnny English 2 - Reborn (2011)
The long awaited Johnny English sequel has been out for a while now, and I've finally watched it!
Johnny's got some gray hair, and the action scenes sometimes look a bit slow when he runs them, but overall the movie manages to combine action and comedy the same way the last one did. Maybe not better, but at least just as well.
A traumatizing incident in Mozambique (deja vu on the incident that killed all agents in the last movie) has made Johnny go into exile and training in a Shaolin temple. That's where we meet him, before he is put back in service by M17 (now owned by Toshiba), and another ridiculously funny mission starts. Sometimes the humor can be a bit lame, but overall, it's not too lame to laugh at. The plot twists unexpectedly at times, and very expectedly at others, but it's varied and the action sequences are much flashier than in the last movie. Better budget I suppose.
There's a boat chase, a helicopter ride, a fight on a ski lift, a wheelchair chase... so there's plenty of watchable content. Rely on Rowan Atkinson to deliver family-friendly comedies. There's been way too few of these lately. The movie features crazy inventions, pokes fun at James Bond regularly, borrows some humor from the Pink Panther movies and I wonder if the black Tucker agent is inspired by the Rush hour trilogy? The frequently present old Chinese assassin/cleaner lady opens for much humor as well.
Johnny English in this movie is more like Pink Panther than James Bond, though there's a lot of similarities between these two series. If Roward Atkinson makes another sequel I suppose it will be a series btw, for now it's just a couple. But if not, this is a well-deserved final. Not a perfect movie, but thoroughly entertaining.
rated 4/5: fo shizzle