Bean there, done that

Rowan Atkinson plays the suave but accident-prone secret agent in his new comedy much as he played the character in the Barclaycard commercials. But they lasted a mere 60 seconds.

Even at 88 minutes, which is short for a feature film, you feel the length of Johnny English, rather than its quality.

Forty years after James Bond set the style, the gadgets and the hotand-cold running heroines, it is sad to think that Working Title couldn't devise a more original bit of business for its star turn than simply spoofing 007. Leslie (Naked Gun) Nielsen and Mike (Austin Powers) Myers (to name just two) have already been there, done that.

Last week's Jackie Chan-Owen Wilson comedy, Shanghai Knights, has exactly the same plot: the attempt by a villainous claimant to grab the throne of England. It's all getting terribly incestuous.

Even screenwriters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade are veterans of two legit James Bond adventures, The World Is Not Enough and Die Another Day. Johnny English feels as if they have been on homeopathic therapy since that stint.

It casts Atkinson as a humble MI7 clerk who might be Mr Bean's brother. He daydreams of himself as a super-cool licensee-to-kill, disdaining guns pointed at his head because they are non-vintage makes, and converting every assassination attempt by a villainess into an amorous assignation.

Reality hits him when all the top Double-0 men are wiped out by a bomb. Only he is left to protect the Crown Jewels, at risk from dastardly Pascal Sauvage, a French tycoon with claims on the English throne and a Napoleonic manner much like Jean-Marie Messier, the ex-owner of Universal Pictures, which produced this movie. Played by John Malkovich with Gérard Depardieu's hairdo and an accent that runs on Eurostar tracks between England and France, he needs the regalia to have himself crowned king once the Queen has been persuaded to abdicate, or the royal corgi will get it.

Sounds over the top? On the contrary, it hits bottom - the bottom being that of the Archbishop of Canterbury, forcibly bared at the Westminster Abbey coronation to prove to the congregation that he is an imposter with a blasphemously tattooed posterior. The sight is only less noxious than the ordeal in the ordure when our hero gatecrashes the villain's chateau through a six-seater latrine just after its use by the entire household staff.

Atkinson's comedy of incompetence is fine as far as it goes, but it goes nowhere else. It is his only trick. English comics are funniest when they retain links with reality. Pushed to extremes, they simply become inane.

Johnny English must never admit to himself that he is in the wrong. But unless you are Jacques Tati, a display of implacable dignity has a short laugh-span. Long before it happens, you get the joke. You anticipate Atkinson fatally overlooking the pit that the thieves have dug in the Tower of London's jewel room while he ponders how they gained entry, or mistaking the vehicle carrying a corpse and mourners for the getaway hearse used in the heist, and so on...