ROWAN Atkinson's bungling Bond caricature began life in a credit-card ad, and that is where it should have ended.

Instead Mr Bean and his creators meet 007, banking on easy money for cheap laughs in the limp form of Johnny English, a spy spoof always that delayed second too far off the pace.

Mike Myers' Austin Powers, Russ Abbot's Basildon Bond, Peter Sellers's Clouseau, Leslie Nielsen's Lieutenant Frank Dreben, even dear old Roger Moore in his spare-tyre Bond days, have passed this way before.

So too has Atkinson, whose Blackadder peak long ago made way for too many reprises of his over-stretched rubbery brand of physical comedy in the Bean franchise.

Anyway, here comes Johnny, jumped-up Johnny English, a very English suit plucked from his desk job at the British Secret Service to take on a key assignment... and all because his maladroit admin has finished off every spy in the building.

If you have seen the trailer, or indeed the Barclaycard ads of the 1990s, then you know the Atkinson house style of buffoonery only too well: his comic character always thinks he knows best, never learns his lesson but by pratfall accident rather than design, ultimately survives his own incompetence to win the day.

More know-all than know-how, English is recruited to guard the newly restored Crown Jewels at the Tower of London, with his long-suffering sidekick Bough (Ben Miller) on stoical back-up. Inevitably, the jewels are nicked, and so Johnny is set on a collision course with Machiavellian business magnate Pascal Sauvage (John Malkovich, all flowing locks and wham-bam ham).

The Johnny English sense of superiority clashes with Johnny Foreigner sophistication as our numbskull spy seeks to thwart the suave Frenchman's plot to overthrow the Queen and inherit the British throne.

The Bond paraphernalia is all there: the script by Die Another Day screenwriters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade; the car chase; the ingenious gadgets; the daredevil airborne heroics; the evil foreign chap with plans to change the world order; and the mysterious girl (Aussie pop poppet Natalie Imbruglia, the mystery being why she is there at all).

No matter director Peter Howitt's obvious affection for both Bond and Atkinson's comic craft, the laughs are too predictable and disappointingly sporadic. Oh dear, another English failure, from a has-Bean.

Updated: 09:23 Friday, April 11, 2003