Johnny English<br></br>The Girl From Rio<br></br>Seeing Double<br></br>The Jungle Book 2

Are you ready, kids? On your marks, get set, say 'bottom!'

It's not uncommon to lament that a film isn't up to the standard of the book or play it's based on, but when it falls short of the advert which spawned it, that's disappointing. Johnny English (PG) is a spin-off of a series of 1990s Barclaycard adverts, starring Rowan Atkinson as a secret agent who was determinedly unaware of his own incompetence. The skits were funny on TV, and they're funny again when they're repeated in the film – all Atkinson has to do to get a laugh is lower his eyelids and let his rubbery lower lip vibrate. Which is lucky, because that's pretty much all he does. I smiled at the jokes, the majority of which involve Johnny's pistol falling to pieces while somebody says "bottom", but only the finale gets close to the heights of sustained farce scaled in the Pink Panther or Naked Gun films.

The director, Peter Howitt (Sliding Doors), has slanted the film towards the children's market. The story feels like a sketch written for the presenters of a pre-teen Saturday morning TV show, as a French tycoon (John Malkovich, oddly enough) steals the Crown Jewels via a whopping great tunnel. Any suggestion of sex or satire has been shelved in favour of blunt, kid-friendly gags, and there's been scant attempt to construct an exciting plot or to up the ante with rip-roaring action or credible characters.

Johnny himself – exhibiting more Beany klutziness than Blackadderesque sangfroid – is as ill-defined after a 90-minute film as he was after a 60-second credit card commercial.

Still, Johnny English supplies enough mindless fun to make it an amusing Easter holiday watch, which is more than can be said for The Girl From Rio (15), starring Atkinson's old Blackadder buddy, Hugh Laurie. It's an amateurish would-be Ealing comedy about a bank clerk who disappears to Brazil with a bagful of cash. I'm a fan of Hugh Laurie, so I'm not going to upset myself by saying any more.

Getting back to Saturday morning kids' TV, Seeing Double (PG) features S Club, the pop sextet manufactured by the Spice Girls' svengali, Simon Fuller. As well as singing a slew of hit singles, S Club have appeared in their own globe-trotting, Monkee-ish TV show, and the film is more of the same. Curiously unambitious for a debut movie, it returns to the same locations (Barcelona and LA) as the television series, it has no big-budget set pieces, and it has none of the famous guest stars that buoyed up Spice World (unless you count Gareth Gates, and I don't). Hannah Spearritt has a ditzy, Goldie Hawnish effervescence, but her fellow Clubbers are remarkably bad actors and the directing is torpid. The director, by the way, is called Nigel Dick, which might have made a better name for Rowan Atkinson's bungling spy.

Disney has been making straight-to-video sequels to its classic films for years, but it was only last year, with Peter Pan 2, that they started shoving these knock-offs into cinemas. It's an insidious development: The Jungle Book 2 (U) does nothing except devalue a time-honoured brand. In a craven sop to the market-researched demographic, poor old Mowgli has been saddled with Haley Joel Osment's voice, a 21st-century vocabulary ("Check this out!"), a love interest and a toddler sidekick. The film only just scrapes past the one-hour mark, and it has only two new songs, neither of which is fit to shine the claws of "The Bare Necessities". And in case you want to make the comparison yourself, that song is reprised three or four times. It's appropriate, because the bare necessities are all this cash-in has to offer. Another cartoon, The Little Polar Bear (U) will provide fluffy entertainment for any children who are sufficiently young and unjaded to be seen at a film called The Little Polar Bear.

n.barber@independent.co.uk