About a month ago Netflix dropped a new series that caught my attention -this happens rarely anymore. It was called Man vs. Bee and the reason it caught my attention was because it starred Rowan Atkinson, who doesn’t appear in new material very often. Outside of a couple Comic Relief reunion specials for Richard Curtis’ Four Weddings and a Funeral and Love, Actually, Atkinson hasn’t appeared in anything in four years. Which has been kind of a bummer for me personally: Rowan Atkinson was a formative comedy figure for me, since I fell in love with Blackadder as a teenager. He’s a man of immense comic talent that rarely gets put to good use anymore. Part of it is down to Atkinson himself -he is a notoriously private individual who doesn’t seem to mind drought periods of his career. He probably knows his immortality rests entirely with Mr. Bean, and is no longer motivated to go out and attempt to disentangle himself from that archetype. There’s nothing wrong with this, but it makes it all the more disappointing when the rare projects he does involve himself with aren’t very good. Still though, I’m always eager for Rowan Atkinson content, always hoping that he finds something he can excel in, and with material that compliments his talents in both new and established ways -he’s going to be in that Paul King-directed Wonka movie with Timothée Chalamet, and it’s the one reason I have any interest in it whatsoever.
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Man vs. Bee was quaint. Nine mini-episodes of Atkinson basically doing the kind of slapstick that was Mr. Bean’s bread and butter, albeit as a different character. It’s not terribly original, but it’s occasionally funny. Though I wish it could have been more. Atkinson doesn’t get to stretch himself much, he’s doing merely the same formula that has worked in the past. For Man vs. Bee, that’s not very surprising given its’ creative team. Atkinson is a credited co-creator, but the writer is William Davies (who apparently pitched the idea to Atkinson multiple times before he accepted), and the director is David Kerr. And these are the same figures who helmed Atkinson’s last (and maybe final) starring movie project: 2018’s Johnny English Strikes Again.
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The Johnny English trilogy (most people would be stunned to hear it’s a trilogy) is maybe the most fascinating subset of Atkinson’s career -the character he perhaps most pursued as a rival to Mr. Bean. Johnny English began as a simple spy spoof for a series of Barclaycard ads in the 90s -basically an agent with all the confidence of James Bond but clumsy and incompetent. Not a terribly original premise, but Atkinson was able to sell it enough that it was eventually reworked for a movie. 2003’s Johnny English (coming the same year as Austin Powers in Goldmember) isn’t all that good of a movie, but it does have a particular charm reminiscent of those early 2000s Bond flicks it was directly parodying (being co-written by actual Bond writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade certainly helped). And Atkinson has some pretty good and original comic moments in it. I am personally a bit partial because it too was a favourite of my teenage years.
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Atkinson clearly loved this character, but sequels did not come swiftly or easily. The second film arrived eight years after the first, and the third a further seven years after that one -Atkinson by the end firmly in his late-period Roger Moore phase. And Johnny English was not so beloved a character as to warrant that kind of patience in an audience who weren’t simply die-hard Atkinson fans like me. That last Johnny English movie was pretty dreadful, as I discussed in my review, a very flat comedy with no real identity clearly past its’ prime on all fronts and relying more on dull Mr. Bean routines and slapstick predicaments rather than cultivating much further a separate character evolved over two movies. It’s predecessor however is a little more interesting.
Watching Man vs. Bee and being a little bit let down by its’ predictability had me thinking about the last time I had truly enjoyed a Rowan Atkinson vehicle. I thought about Maigret, his attempt at a serious detective series in 2016, but had found it and his performance too dull as much as I admired the effort. Instead I landed on 2011’s Johnny English Reborn, which I had liked on initial viewing, but also on a re-watch several years later. Revisiting it again, I find it may be the most underrated movie of his career (give or take a Rat Race).
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To be clear, this is not an overlooked masterpiece and it has its’ share of flaws that will be discussed. But it is the only one of the Johnny English movies that feels like a real movie, rather than a sequence of gags, that has some genuine filmmaking acumen behind it, and actually really seems to care about the ‘spy’ part of its’ spy comedy. It was directed by Oliver Parker, who has a decent resume within the British film industry including the 1995 Othello, the St. Trinian’s movies, and three notable adaptations of Oscar Wilde. Johnny English Reborn is the only installment of the series not to have script input from Davies (he’s credited just with the story), it was instead written by Hamish McColl, who’d co-written Mr. Bean’s Holiday before and would after receive story credit with Paul King on the first Paddington -that said, he did also co-write Artemis Fowl.
The plot concerns Johnny English returning to MI7 (this series’ transparent stand-in for MI6), after years in exile at a Tibetan monastery following a traumatic experience that resulted in the assassination of the President of Mozambique several years prior. He is recalled to investigate a similar plot to assassinate the Chinese Premier during critical talks with the British government.
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If the first movie had been a send-up of the cheesiness of late-period Pierce Brosnan Bond, Johnny English Reborn is more about tackling the comparative realism of the Daniel Craig era -although it’s certainly taking influence from Sean Connery and George Lazenby (notably in its’ climax) as well. It isn’t shot so much like a comedy as that first movie, Parker adopting a visual style that more closely resembles a serious spy thriller -or as serious as that could get with Rowan Atkinson at the centre of it all. The plotting isn’t terribly over-the-top, there are a couple beats of real sincerity, and probably most notably the film doesn’t reduce English to a simple buffoon. The first and third movies play him as hopelessly out of his depth on every matter, which can maybe be excused in that former instalment by his novice nature. This movie however strikes well a balance to English’s ineptitude. A great illustration of this is the Hong Kong set-piece where the elaborate stunts of his adversary are contrasted with his modest methods –tying in to the skills he learned in that monastery. All through the chase and subsequent fight, the joke is how thoroughly in control he is –and you can feel Atkinson relishing the chance to be smooth for a change. It’s a really good sequence that still manages to play Johnny English for the fool in the end when its’ punctuated by him simply by accident handing the key he had gone to all that trouble to get to an obvious enemy agent. The joke of English actually being a good secret agent in a given circumstance only to muck it up by not thinking something through recurs a few more times, and plays well with a different level of humour for Atkinson. It also establishes the character more strongly I feel.
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The characters around him are also more firm -still serving their functions but slightly more than mere foils. A post-Die Another Day but pre-Gone Girl Rosamund Pike acts as English’s love interest, a behavioural psychologist with MI7. A pre-Get Out Daniel Kaluuya is English’s observant junior assistant. And Gillian Anderson is the stern new head of MI7, Pegasus. Each of these figures, though still largely archetypal, feel like step ups from the first film –largely because the acting quality all around is better (apologies to Ben Miller). The film also features Dominic West as a fellow agent and obvious turncoat English has a bit too much of a hero crush on, and to my great delight Tim McInnerny as the quartermaster in a role that is essentially just a new version of Darling from Blackadder.
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The world in general just seems richer than in either the previous movie or the subsequent one. Part of this is that we’re privy to more of it, English travels between four countries during the course of its’ plot. The production values are nowhere near the level of the Bond movies it would emulate, but they are by a margin the strongest of this series -this entry had the biggest budget of the three and it shows. Its’ allowed sharper, more thrilling action scenes, inventively constructed through comic character. I love the sequence for instance where English flies a helicopter in search of a hospital at ground-level along the M25 to better get his bearings. Here also provides a good needle-drop of “Don’t Give Up on Us” by David Soul. There are a couple other solid music references in the movie too, particularly a hilarious sudden appearance of “Word Up” that easily outpaces the first films’ tedious ABBA sequence that was just an excuse to bring Mr. Bean into the film.
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That never happens in Johnny English Reborn, Parker, McColl, and Atkinson firmly allowing this character his own freedom, for better or worse. Atkinson still partakes in that great physical comedy that might not be out of place on Mr. Bean (like the ascending chair gag), but rarely mugs in the way Bean does (and when he does there’s adequate context). Johnny English isn’t Blackadder either, which would have been the other temptation, as though he has a fair few witty remarks, he is nowhere as smart and is mostly well-meaning. Though the first movie laid the groundwork, it is this one that really gives Atkinson the chance to play and develop a new comic character, and that’s exciting. And there’s some nuance and a shred of depth to him that doesn’t feel hollow. The backstory with his trauma, as comically played as it is, has weight. His naïve trust of and inadequacy next to West’s Ambrose reveal relatable insecurities. There are moments where Atkinson makes me feel for the guy, which doesn’t come up often given the shape of his career and other roles. It’s a character I would follow on other adventures, had Universal and StudioCanal properly capitalized on him in any meaningful way.
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All of this said of course, the movie once again is not great and I understand the generally mixed response it got (none of these movies were particularly lauded). For one thing its’ favourite running gag (one that showed up a lot in the marketing) is pretty stupid and barely funny. English and Kaluuya’s Tucker are pursued through the movie by an elderly Chinese assassin, and at multiple points English beats on an old lady he mistakes for her, the big clincher for this ultimately being when it turns out to be the Queen at the very end. On rewatch I did note it doesn’t recur as much as I remember, but the main sequence (in which the hapless victim is Pegasus’ mother) is drawn out obnoxiously. The movie’s also fairly light on gags, which means that when one doesn’t quite hit, it’s more noticeable. There are a couple bits that clearly the writers thought were really funny in theory, but in practice aren’t much more than mildly amusing. For example, the standoff in the restaurant bathroom between English, Tucker, and Ambrose that they awkwardly retreat from when somebody enters, pretending to be mulling about. Or that beat early on where English accidentally tries a voice modulator -the joke just being that he sounds like a little girl. That mime with the cat in Pegasus’ office is also just weird (why does he keep calling her “pussy” in 2011?). And for as much as I appreciate the dedication to the plotting, it’s still nothing original to write home about -with the movie being more of a general spy-comedy than a direct Bond parody it can’t get away so much with derivative subjects. Say what you will about the Austin Powers movies, but they were bonkers in ways those 70s Bond movies never were. Johnny English by contrast has always lacked a certain character. There’s a place for subtlety of course, and for a less over-the-top, more sophisticated approach to spy-comedy, but these movies never had that in ways that could stand out, and though the best one, Reborn is no exception.
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However I think it is a movie worth consideration, especially where it comes to Rowan Atkinson, whose film work hasn’t exactly yielded a pool of riches. Undoubtedly the best movie of his career is The Lion King -and most people probably forget he’s even in it. That said I don’t think I’m grading it on a curve when I say Johnny English Reborn is worth a watch as a perfectly above-average spy comedy that makes good use of its’ star in ways you might not be expecting. I for one still enjoy it. The Johnny English movies are a strange anomaly in the realm of British film comedy that one might expect to simply be a big thing in the U.K. that just doesn’t translate elsewhere, like the equally bizarre Nativity film series. But it doesn’t seem to be terribly big over there either, and given the longevity between movies, their lack of memorability in the public consciousness, and lukewarm reception from both critics and audiences, it’s easy to see them as a mere Atkinson vanity project. On some level I think they are that, but they’re also fascinating as the Atkinson product of the twenty-first century (as Blackadder was in the 80s and Mr. Bean was in the 90s). It’s also curious to look at them as representative of Atkinson’s career arc over twenty years: starting out as a safe but redressed take on a popular persona, becoming an attempt to branch out from that only to be rejected and end up yet another retread of the old hits. Johnny English Reborn feels to me like the critical point Atkinson’s career could have changed direction.
I liked Man vs. Bee alright I suppose, but it still saddens me that Atkinson seems stuck in a rut he doesn’t particularly enjoy -performing the familiar style of physical slapstick comedy that made him an international star more than thirty years ago, but with no longer the same energy or originality it once did. I’m looking out for him to have a late-period renaissance, to make a movie or invent a character that can redefine him. I’m not sure Wonka can do that, although sticking with Paul King, who seems to be a fan, is a good idea. Until such a project materializes I’ll be watching, and thinking back on those scenes from Johnny English Reborn that hint at a richer performance quality still aching to be expressed.
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