This Sequel Was Worth Waiting For


The incomparable Rowan Atkinson returns as Johnny English, in the long-awaited sequel (I was waiting, anyway), and he's in robustly fine form.

This movie is hilarious; I haven't laughed so much in a movie theatre - for the right reasons - in a lonnnng time. Some of the bits are based on English's savvy factor (yes, he has one!), like the clever long sequence where the not-so-spry spy uses ingenuity to keep up with the person he's chasing, and some of them are based on his obtuseness, like the way he drinks the drink he shouldn't be drinking and the way he doesn't get that the person who's the mole is actually the mole. It's a tribute to his genius that Atkinson makes these scenes hilarious, when in any other hands they would fall flat.

There's a running bit with an assassin cleaning woman from hell which for all intensive purposes should not be funny, but in Atkinson's hands every scene involving her (or whom he believes to be her) is also hilarious. And even when you see stuff coming from a mile away, it still winds up being laugh-aloud funny when orchestrated by the comic gold mine that is Atkinson. Cannot wait for the DVD.