Johnny English: Licensed to annoy continuously.

Rowan Atkinson was back on the big screen in 2011 with a sequel to the bungling spy flick Johnny English and as much as I love him, Johnny English: Reborn is below average at best.

Sure, the first movie was okay, but it wasn’t anything that really blew you away. The whole bungling spy thing has been done several times, take The Naked Gun for example. Johnny English never really added anything to the genre, it just existed within it.

The whole premise is essentially: what if James Bond was an idiot? And the filmmakers pretty much ran with that for the first movie. For the second they do very much the same thing. 

That’s what I didn’t really understand about Johnny English: Reborn, it adds absolutely nothing to the first movie. It’s just the same sort of thing: cocky spy thinks he’s all that and it turns out he actually isn’t all that. It has the same feeling as Steve Martin’s The Pink Panther 2. The first instalment was a below average but watchable movie, and the second just carried it on for no apparent reason adding absolutely nothing but Andy Garcia.

Johnny English: Reborn is the same as its predecessor. Same sort of humour, same silliness, same cringeworthy sector of Brit comedy, except this time Bough isn’t in it.

As for the character himself, as funny as Rowan Atkinson can be, Johnny can get a bit irritating in that his idiocy goes beyond what’s believable; after all he is supposed to be a British spy. Can’t blame that on the cuts surely.

That’s the thing though, there are some moments in the movie where he’s very much the Jimmy Bond character he mocks, chasing down baddies, pulling off stunts in a wheelchair, the usual spy stuff. But then you get moments where he makes mistakes you wouldn’t expect a five-year-old to make.

But the most irritating thing about Johnny English: Reborn is that it’s just too darn predictable. You can see everything coming a mile off. Every bungling mistake, every stupid remark, every single idiotic moment is telegrammed straight to you like a predictable bit of junk-mail through your letterbox.

Add that predictability to the fact that you know who the baddie is the very first time they appear on screen and you end up watching a movie you think you’ve already seen.

And that’s because you have seen it, back in 2003 when the original came out, or on ITV2 where it seems to often be on a continuous loop from dusk til dawn.

This movie offers little and adds nothing to the original at all. It misses Ben Miller, though the new sidekick has his own charms about him in fairness. Overall I’d steer clear unless it’s on ITV2+1 on the same night as X-Factor.

Final Verdict: 2 Stars. Fun in parts but too predictable and adds nothing to its predecessor.