Seven years after the second film, a cyber attack exposes MI7’s field agents, forcing the agency to reinstate inactive agents, including Johnny English. Now a geography teacher, he secretly trains his students in espionage. Accidentally incapacitating the other retired agents, English is the sole agent left to accept the mission. He insists on his old sidekick and MI7 clerk, Jeremy Bough. Collecting their equipment, including explosive jelly babies and a tracker disguised as a Sherbet Fountain, English and Bough leave behind their mobile and drive an Aston Martin V8 Vantage to France to investigate.
They arrive at the Hotel Magnifique in Antibes, where the cyber attack originated. Undercover as waiters, they steal a mobile with a photo of the next target, the Dot Calm yacht, and English accidentally sets fire to the restaurant. Sneaking onto the yacht, he and Bough are caught by Russian operative Ophelia Bhuletova, but escape after seeing many computer servers.
Pursuing Bhuletova's electric BMW through the countryside, English and Bough run out of fuel. She finds them, arranging to meet at the Hotel de Paris in Cagnes-sur-Mer. While English meets her at the hotel bar, Bough discovers she is a spy, but English rejects his suspicions. Attempting to kill him in his room upon nightfall, Bhuletova fails after a sleepless English accidentally consumes energy pills instead of sleeping pills and forcefully vacates the room to attend a party, accidentally knocking her out in the process. She pursues him, but her various attempts to assassinate the oblivious English are inadvertently parried, ending with her being accidentally knocked out once more.
Further cyber attacks force the Prime Minister to solidify an agreement with Silicon Valley billionaire Jason Volta, to be revealed during a forthcoming G12 meeting. Learning Volta owns the Dot Calm, and suspecting he is behind the cyber attack, English and Bough return home and plan to infiltrate Volta's mansion to seek proof. In preparation, English is given a virtual reality exploration of the building, but he unintentionally leaves the simulation room, assaulting various people while in the virtual environment. Arriving at the mansion, English discovers Bhuletova is also a spy, and he records evidence of Volta's plans with her iPhone, but accidentally presses the wrong button, playing music from the phone and exposing himself. English escapes, hijacking a driving instructor's car, returning to MI7 after being chased by Volta.
However, English mixes up iPhones with a driving student, thus failing to convince MI7 and the Prime Minister of Volta's schemes. Hearing of both the restaurant and virtual reality incidents, she fires English, Bough and Pegasus and proceeds with the G12 meeting in Scotland. Bough convinces English to stop Volta anyway, enlisting his wife Lydia, a Navy captain of submarine HMS Vengeance, to arrive at Garroch Castle via Loch Nevis.
Bhuletova attempts to kill Volta but, knowing she is a spy, he has immunized himself to her poison ring and removed her gun's firing pin. Scaling the castle using a powered bodysuit, English intervenes before Volta can kill her, who escapes. Volta plans to extort the G12 leaders by threatening to shut down the internet. English calls MI7, forgetting Lydia's warning about using a mobile near the submarine. An MI7 secretary unintentionally places two telephones next to each other: one on a call from English, the other from Lydia, calling to confirm a launch code English inadvertently keyed in. Mistakenly given the order to attack by English, Lydia launches a ballistic missile. The missile diverts to a Sherbet Fountain beacon left by English on the Dot Calm, destroying the yacht and Volta's server.
English, in a suit of armour, Bough and Bhuletova chase Volta to his helicopter as he starts to reroute the attack to a server in Nevada. Bhuletova gives English a tablet to disable Volta's Aerospatiale Gazelle helicopter. When Volta mocks English's inability to use digital technology, English throws the tablet at Volta, hitting him in the head and knocking him out, then smashes his phone with a sword to stop the attack. The Prime Minister praises and forgives English for his attitude, who accidentally disrobes before the press and G12 leaders while removing the armour.
English returns to his school as a guest speaker, welcomed by his students. However, to his horror, he sees the headmaster about to eat one of the explosive Jelly Babies.
In May 2017, it was announced that Rowan Atkinson would be returning to take the role of Johnny English in the sequel to the film Johnny English Reborn (2011). On 3 August 2017, Working Title Films announced that they had begun production and filming with the director David Kerr. The cinematographer was Florian Hoffmeister. This is the second spy film starring both Rowan Atkinson and Edward Fox, who appears in a minor role as the retired Agent Nine (Atkinson and Fox had both appeared earlier in the 1983 non-Eon James Bond film Never Say Never Again).
Reception
Johnny English Strikes Again has grossed $4.4 million in the United States and Canada, and $154.5 million elsewhere (including $23.2 million in the United Kingdom), for a total worldwide gross of $159 million.
In the United States and Canada, Johnny English Strikes Again was released alongside Hunter Killer and Indivisible as well as the wide expansion of Mid90s, and was projected to gross around $2 million from 544 theatres in its opening weekend. It ended up debuting to $1.6 million, finishing 12th at the box office.
