In the 80s or 90s in England there were a series of television ads for a Barclays credit card that were each made into a tiny feature, like a tiny, thirty second movie, mildly spoofing one thing or another, but always using the same comedic actor. Would you ever imagine that this character could get his own feature length movie some decades later?
Fast forwarding from Barclays advertiss-ments (as they call them in England), picture me at my brother's house outside of Sacramento a few months ago, rummaging through a pair of boxes of DVDs that were about to be tossed; the Great Salvaging of Citrus Heights as the day was known (to me). One of the movies starred a comedic English actor that I enjoy, and with a tagline like "He knows no fear. He knows no danger. He knows...nothing.", I thought it would probably be just atrocious enough to get some ironic laughter from and toss it myself after the initial viewing.
The comedic actor is none other than Rowan Atkinson, best known in the States as Mr. Bean, but Black Adder is a must see for fans of British comedy, and don't forget his seven minutes of screen time in the Anjelica Huston vehicle The Witches. In each of those meager moments on screen you know exactly where his character stands, and they're all funny in their own way.
The name of this movie starring Rowan Atkinson that I learned later was based on commercials from the past is Johnny English.
I guess with that tagline I expected a spy spoof of the likes of the late Leslie Nielson films, the poorly written and crudely thought out spoofs that make you groan and almost turn off the movie. That is definitely not this film. There is some slapstick, but the movie's not a slapstick; and if it's a spoof, it's not an American spoof, it, apparently, passes for a British spoof; and while Rowan's Johnny English is kind of a bumbler, he's not a walking menace like John Candy's Harry Crumb in Who is Harry Crumb?, a detective that ends up almost on the right track despite getting all the conclusions wrong.
Johnny English loves his job, loves England, does have some detective skills, does have some natural cop-like hunches that do turn out to be correct, and does surround himself with a very capable sidekick. There is some humor that has nothing to do with slapstick, poo, or hidden cameras, but there's also humor that has those three modern hallmarks.
There was an element that I found intellectually interesting while I was watching it: the film is very nationalistic for England. The antagonist is a character named Pascal Sauvage, and he is played by John Malkovich with long gray hair and an accent that is about as annoying as anything I've listened too since Ong Bak. Sauvage is a French billionaire with ties to the English throne through his relations to the Norman conquest of 1066, a billionaire who made his fortune by way of owning prisons throughout the world. It almost makes sense in the context of his evil plans, but...
When I say that the film is nationalistic for England, it is, but maybe the things I found more intellectually stimulating were the cultural cues that would only be understood by the English. At first I thought it was amusing how Johnny English outright--and from the first moment his name is mentioned-- doesn't like Sauvage because he's French. What I first took to be English stereotyping might be more than that, or maybe it's a stereotype for a reason. That's not as much a cultural cue as the mentioning of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
When I say the Archbishop of Canterbury to any of you fine folks, my small cadre of readers, does it mean a damn thing? If you'd come to me and asked me what I knew about that trio of words, I could come up with something like, "I'm guessing it's a guy, probably the top-guy in the place called Canterbury, probably having to do with the Church of England (Anglican Church)", all only things I could gather from my knowledge of England, some of her cities, and her main (state) religion.
I've been trying to discover cultural cues for us, for Americans...Shoeless Joe, maybe...Harrient Tubman, maybe...do we have any titular institutional rulers in this country? Besides Presidents? See, that's what makes that kind of comparison hard, the fact that we don't have non-governmental institutions that rotate people through a titled position. Well...university chancellors and presidents, maybe...but the lack of a state religion is the main culprit in that. The only culprit, really.
I digress. I learned more about something which I knew next to nothing about from this silly Rowan Atkinson movie, and it wasn't trying to teach it to me, it was made with the understanding that I knew all that history already. That's what I found interesting. The film almost seemed like it wasn't going to be sent abroad, or that little thought was spent on making it more atractive to, ahem, a big country full of people who go to see a lot of movies.
Wow. Cultural cue conversations and history lessons, all from a movie based on credit card commercials that doesn't even reach ninety minutes even after the credits roll. At least Field of Dreams is emotionally powerful enough that the American cultural cues can be more easily overlooked and the movie experienced by people in other countries.
Rowan Atkinson does, though, get a few chances of tearing ass through London in an Aston-Martin.
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