Johnny English (2003)

Johnny English arrived in 2003, a full decade before the culture decided that a man falling over in a corridor required an ideological audit. It is a spy spoof and it knows it. Rowan Atkinson bumbles through MI7, John Malkovich chews the scenery as a French prison magnate, and the Crown Jewels go missing. The film has no interest in instructing anyone about anything, which in the present climate reads almost as an act of rebellion.

The picture's few concessions to contemporary sensibilities are so slight they barely register. Lorna Campbell, played by Natalie Imbruglia, is an Interpol agent who is competent, resourceful, and occasionally rescues the hero; she is also a Bond girl in a comedy, and the film treats her accordingly. The villain is a wealthy industrialist who wants to convert Britain into the world's largest prison, a premise that gestures at anti-wealth sentiment without ever committing to it. It is a stock inheritance from a hundred Bond pictures, not a thesis. The cast is white, British, and unbothered by the question. A sushi waiter appears. A guard appears. The film moves on.

There is no romance with identity here, no environmental sermon, no lecture smuggled into the third act. Sauvage's claim to the Stuart line is a gag, not a re-reading of the historical record. A joke about donating his brain to schizophrenia research is a joke. The film is a relic: a comedy that wants only to make people laugh and occasionally wince, and which succeeds at roughly a third of that ambition. As a specimen of cultural awareness, it sits close to inert. As a document of what mainstream comedy looked like before every script came with a checklist, it is quietly instructive.