There are not many characters from television adverts with whom you'd wish to spend longer than the time it takes to sell their product.

For instance, most would prefer liposuction to anything over a minute in the company of the Cockney twit permanently cleaning floors in the Flash ad.

However, this pretty decent spy spoof had its origins in the Barclaycard advert featuring Atkinson as a bumbling British secret agent.

Extended to feature length, it does show stretch marks but there's more than enough quality writing and a spot-on performance by Atkinson to recommend it.

The comedian had already made a similar appearance in the Bond movie Never Say Never Again and the writers actually penned the script for The World Is Not Enough.

So, with the credentials in place, it was time to licence Johnny English to kill (and a security bungle down to him wipes out Britain's key agents in the opening reel).

With English as the only choice to protect British interests, he immediately has the Crown Jewels stolen from under his nose.

It transpires they have been pinched by evil Gallic aristocrat Pascal Sauvage (a splendidly camp Malkovich), who intends to occupy the British throne.

The timing taps perfectly into Francophobic feeling over here, with English observing that "the only thing the French should be allowed to host is an invasion."

More Blackadder than Bean, English displays less of the former's world weariness and more of a guileless, hopeless optimism.

Acutely conscious of his ability to cock up, he patiently explains to sidekick Bough (Miller) that he hadn't landed on the wrong building but was "doing a sweep of the immediate environment".

Imbruglia does a serviceable if underwritten job in her feature debut as English's love interest, Lorna Campbell, while Peter 'Sliding Doors' Howitt directs with restraint.

After a series of comic catastrophes, it's nice to thoroughly recommend a film that's funny because of its Britishness and not in spite of it.

Tim Evans