The Blog Complainer’s Journal, 30th of September 2018: The month of September has reached it’s end and September has been a bad month for entertainment: with the passing of Burt Reynolds, acclaimed comedian Bill Cosby sent to the slammer, Cavil and Batfleck dropping out of the DCEU, another season of Insatiable being confirmed, Telltale Games shutting down midway through the final season of The Walking Dead and Marvel calling the Academy out for their most popular movie category. (That actually may be a good thing.) But September has been a dark month for this Complainer as well. Not being able to find the time to finish playing the new Spiderman game before going away on holidays, not finding the time to be all caught up on BoJack Horseman to review the new season, only now starting Season 1 of Daredevil and not having enough time to finish it before Season 3 comes out and missing out on the chance to make fun of The Predator.
But the one thing that has really pulled The Blog Complainer’s strings is all the average forgettable movies he had to watch this month. Hang on, I’ve got a tear in my eye, Oh God I’m Cracking up, I need a tissue! (The Blog Complainer blows passionately into his tissue and then rips out another tissue to wipe his teary eyes.) I just saw Johnny English Strikes Again and it broke me!
Over a month ago I reviewed the first two Johnny English movies and I just read that review again and it’s pretty entertaining and I’m going to refer back to that in this review so I recommend reading that one first.
I said I would check out the new movie too and as I could only find a few reviews on this movie I may be one of the few people who actually decided to go and see it and review it. I’m a man of my word and my word is it really sucks!
Let’s start from the beginning and what I hate about all these movies is that they never acknowledge the existence of the previous movies. There is no mention of English forcing the Archbishop to moon all of England, there is no mention of his two knighthoods and there is no mention of Toshiba sponsoring MI7. This movie starts off with English forgetting he ever was trained by Tibetan Monks and now he works at a boarding school training little kids to be modern day Ethan Hunts. He’s not a secret agent anymore, I guess because he got bored of it. MI7 has had a complete makeover again with a new addition of random people we have never met. This business pretty much has had as many changeovers as the Griswold kids at this point. The only thing that is the same is Johnny English is still a dumbass and they replaced the best change from Reborn with that old other dumbass from the first movie.
The plot of Strikes Again couldn’t be more cliched if it tried. Someone is exposing the agents using the modern high-tech source known as THE INTERNET! (Also if you haven’t heard of this plot before then congratulations you deserve a free T-shirt saying ‘This is my first Spy movie, everybody’) Then they rip off themselves by killing off every agent in MI7 so Johnny English has to save the day for the third time in 14 years.
To stick with the plot let’s talk about the love interest and the villain. This Love Interest is kind of like the Aussie chick from the first movie except she doesn’t fall in love with English at the end. The movie makes you think she is working for the villain then you find out she is a double agent for the Russians. She is super-hot as well and she is also the worst assassin ever because she can’t kill the clumsy Johnny English. The Villain of this movie is easily the worst villain I’ve seen all year. He’s like a college student Mark Zuckerberg type of guy who controls internet servers and everything power related. He tries to make all of Europe sign a thing so he can take over the world and rule the world wide web and stuff. He sucks! Firstly because he doesn’t look like someone who would be interested in taking over the world, and secondly his motivation is really weak and lastly, this has been on my mind whenever I saw this guy, he’s so underwhelming you could just hire some average Joe (like me for example) to take out his three henchmen and then sock the smirking smart-ass in the jaw and Boom! World Saved.
Alright Let’s get into the Humour because that’s what all these movies are about in the end. So the humour didn’t make me laugh at all but there was an older woman behind me who laughed at_every____single______joke and also my cinema was full of little kids. For this movie I thought the humour was handled more poorly than the other two movies. Half of these jokes I could see coming well before they happened, like the scene where English puts on the virtual reality set and he didn’t turn on the containment treadmill thing so he just wandered the streets harassing people. I thing anyone could see that coming but I think they could’ve experimented with it a bit more because I don’t think it reached its full potential.
Also we have a continuity error in the scene where the Russian lady catches English and Bough on her yacht. Bough falls back into the water and we hear a splash sound and then English falls back but onto the deck below, not into the water. If it’s subtle I’m fine with it but when it’s only purpose is to tell a joke that’s when I find it a problem. Lastly, before I wrap this baby up, if you are in the age of Teens to, I guess, 90’s or even late 80’s then this movie is not for you. If you’re a toddler or someone who doesn’t understand anything about the Internet than this movie is the perfect movie for you. I believe the evil plot about the Internet was to attract the modern generation to this movie but the problem is this movie was written by a bunch of old hacks who don’t know anything about what they’re writing about. I believe this because I’m from the current generation and have a good understanding of how the internet works and how it is presented in the movie is not how the internet actually works. They understand the surface but not the nitty gritty part and I believe that’s mostly because they’re hacks and they don’t care if their movie makes any sense.
My overall thoughts on this movie and this series and why they are all so painfully average and why they’re all basically the same movie is because they all want to make you have a good time. But not in a way you would remember, but in a way that you would immediately forget about by the next day. The people who make the Johnny English movies want you to enjoy yourself so you can tell a few friends and then by the time they come out on DVD you would’ve forgotten what happened so you buy the DVDs to remind yourself. That’s why every Johnny English movie ignores the last movie’s existence, that’s why every side character is removed after their first appearance, that’s why they all feel like the same movie and that is why they’re so forgettable. They’re all carefully produced to be cloned copies of each other because the makers of Johnny English think you’re as dumb as Johnny English himself.
As for this new one, it is easily my least favourite of this series because it felt way more half-assed than the other two. Didn’t expect this review to be this long and you can be thankful there will be no Johnny English type reviews for a long while. So that’s it for another review, Venom comes out this week – looking forward to seeing what Sony does with this one.
Until Next Time, I’m The Blog Complainer, Signing Out.
