Johnny English Strikes Again movie review (2018)

The joke is this: Johnny English (Atkinson) is a supremely confident and supremely incompetent spy. He is also thoughtless, clueless, and hapless, but somehow lucky when it comes to saving the day. In this episode, he has retired and is teaching at one of those boarding schools in a picturesque British countryside. There is a flicker of interest as we see him instructing his young pupils in spycraft, and for a moment we think there is some potential here with him as a sort of Dumbledore for a Hogwarts of spy kids. But no such luck. We are stuck with the bumbling but smug aging spy and his inexplicably devoted sidekick.

English is called back into service because a cyber-attack has exposed every agent in the field and most of the other retired agents are either “dead, having hip operations, or recovering from prostate surgery.” If you think that is hilarious, this movie is for you.

The G12 meeting of world leaders is about to take place and the Prime Minister (Thompson) is desperate. She becomes even more desperate after English accidentally dispatches all of the other retired spies (played by old pros Michael Gambon, James Fox, and Charles Dance). Because she has no other choice, she sends English to find out where the attacks are coming from.

As in all spy movies, we have to see him pick up his equipment. The Q equivalent tries to give him safety warnings and a hybrid car, but English is old school and will take nothing connected to the Internet, either to protect himself from cyber-espionage or because he has no idea how they work. Actually, both. English also picks up his sidekick, Bough (Ben Miller), who had been all but forgotten at a desk in what looks like a supply closet. They grab the vintage Aston Martin, pop in a mixtape cassette, and drive off to France. They have to go undercover as waiters, which for some reason they think means speaking English with French accents, and of course it ends up with a flambé dish going terribly, terribly wrong.