It's not just that the jokes are funnier (there's one explicit poo joke, which is one too many, but still: it's just the one) or that Rowan Atkinson is a far better performer than Mike Myers, or anything comparatively trivial like that. No. The real difference is that "Johnny English" has its heart in the right place. Part of this difference is the fact that it has a heart at all.
English, unlike Powers, is not just a blank space in which the screenwriters can insert gags. He's a character. And there's more to the character than just clumsiness and pomposity. English is endearing because he's manifestly no fool. We know more than he knows, we see the banana skin immediately in front of his feet which he invariably fails to see, and in a way it's his fault he fails to see it himself, but his failure to see it is always something other than a failure of intelligence. He's easy enough to humiliate but, for some reason, hard to hoodwink. It's refreshing, too, that we're allowed to feel for him - when, for instance, he's dismissed from the case. We see Johnny English being devastated, not Rowan Atkinson trying to be funny.
Sure, it's not what it could have been. It's funny without being brilliantly so, and the satire (what there is of it) is on the blunt side. But these merely negative failings aren't enough to kill a film. Its biggest problem may be bad timing. When the script was being written, the anti-French sentiment must have seemed quaint and amusing, harmless because unreal; nobody could have predicted, surely, the sickening wave of hatred (the fact that it was all planned by the likes of Rupert Murdoch does not, alas, make the hatred any less real) that was shortly to sweep over the English-speaking world. Any joke about the French now has a sour taste at best.
English, unlike Powers, is not just a blank space in which the screenwriters can insert gags. He's a character. And there's more to the character than just clumsiness and pomposity. English is endearing because he's manifestly no fool. We know more than he knows, we see the banana skin immediately in front of his feet which he invariably fails to see, and in a way it's his fault he fails to see it himself, but his failure to see it is always something other than a failure of intelligence. He's easy enough to humiliate but, for some reason, hard to hoodwink. It's refreshing, too, that we're allowed to feel for him - when, for instance, he's dismissed from the case. We see Johnny English being devastated, not Rowan Atkinson trying to be funny.
Sure, it's not what it could have been. It's funny without being brilliantly so, and the satire (what there is of it) is on the blunt side. But these merely negative failings aren't enough to kill a film. Its biggest problem may be bad timing. When the script was being written, the anti-French sentiment must have seemed quaint and amusing, harmless because unreal; nobody could have predicted, surely, the sickening wave of hatred (the fact that it was all planned by the likes of Rupert Murdoch does not, alas, make the hatred any less real) that was shortly to sweep over the English-speaking world. Any joke about the French now has a sour taste at best.