Thursday, July 17, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Film: Half-baked Bean

Johnny English proves the Brits make bad flicks too

By Anthony Allison

Here are four good things about Johnny English. First, at 78 minutes, this English spy spoof starring Rowan Atkinson as a bumbling James Bond who saves Britain from a dastardly French mastermind (with help from sexy Australian Natalie Imbruglia and straight man Ben Miller, and hindrance from boss Tim Pigott-Smith), is mercifully short.

Second, this glossy British production is a welcome reminder that Hollywood is not alone in foisting lame-ass movies on benighted moviegoers. This nonsense is just as dumb and disjointed as, say, Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle.

Third, it proves that being John Malkovich just ain't what it used to be. Apparently John was abducted by aliens and replaced by a talentless impostor whose French accent, easily the worst in film history, is a total giveaway.

Finally, Peter Howitt's "comedy" will save you money. Instead of paying to see it in theaters now, you can safely wait until it turns up on TV, where it--and Atkinson--belong.

Fans of "Black Adder" and "Mr. Bean" know that the rubber-faced British comic is a master of histrionic overacting and slapstick. And here, there are quite a few funny gags.

But as with the 1997 movie Bean, the stretch from small-scale TV skits to feature-film length is simply too much. Not even seasoned pros like Die Another Day screenwriters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade (and co-writer William Davies) could devise anything more original than taking predictable potshots at the pompous English aristocracy.

After his auspicious directorial debut, Sliding Doors, Howitt has now sunk to hired hackdom. He and his team go through the motions, with good sets, costumes and music, slick stunt driving and cool second-unit shots of an Aston Martin negotiating hairpin bends in the South of France. But it all amounts to a dreadful waste of real filmmaking talent. They, and their audience, deserve better.

Numb together, dumb together

Bad Boys II isn't a movie. It's an anesthetic, a celluloid lobotomy, an overdose of cinematic chemotherapy that, if you still have one, is guaranteed to fry your brain--or actionmeister Jerry Bruckheimer and his Pearl Harbor partner-in-crime Michael Bay will personally refund your money. (Yeah, right.)

Bruck-Bay's mind-numbing sequel to their surprise 1995 hit begins with a Ku Klux Klan rally and drags through 2 1/2 interminable hours of hyper-violence and profanity until Martin Lawrence ends it by whining, "Oh this is bullshit!" as Miami narco-cop Marcus Burnett and his "ride together/die together" partner Mike Lowrey (Will Smith) float off down the Intracoastal Waterway. (If there's a god in movie heaven, they'll be eaten by alligators and never return.)

The last of many ludicrously over-extended setpieces is a Hummer/Land Rover chase that razes an entire hillside of Cuban hovels before ending in a minefield outside the Gulag Archipel--er, Guantanamo Bay. The setting is improbable but apt, because all John Ashcroft has to do is inflict this torturous film on Guantanamo's pesky "enemy combatants" and, whimpering, they'll immediately draw him a road map to Osama's cave.

The plot follows our plucky heroes as they help an undercover agent (Gabrielle Union, Marcus' sister and Mike's love interest) nab a Miami drug lord (Jordi Mollˆ). If that sounds familiar, it's not because you saw Bad Boys eight years ago but 2 Fast 2 Furious six weeks ago: This is an exact replica.

Aside from two computer-generated sequences showing a bullet's lethal trajectory in super slow-mo, the film's non-stop kinetic frenzy is a textbook case of style failing to veil lack of substance. The camera may swoop and fly. But unlike John Woo, who turns shootouts into soaring visual poetry, Bruck-Bay's leaden cinema never looks like anything more than the uninspired work of spoiled boys playing with expensive movie toys.