Some may wonder why “Johnny English Reborn,” the sequel to the 2003 James Bond spoof, “Johnny English,” starring Rowan Atkinson as a bumbling MI7 agent, was even made, seeing as the original earned a modest $28 million at the United States box office.The short answer is that Mr. Atkinson, the brilliant British master of controlled comedy, is a global star whose two Mr. Bean movies have each grossed upward of $200 million internationally, and the original “Johnny English” a hefty $160 million.It is also worth noting that the sequel, made with a new director, Oliver Parker (“St. Trinian’s”), is funnier and has a stronger personality than its forerunner. Mr. Atkinson’s buffoonery is sly and subtle, centered on his endlessly elastic face, especially his wide brown eyes and elevator brows that do comedic jigs.The sad fact is that Mr. Atkinson’s brand of British lunacy, in which the humor breaks through a pose of stiff-upper-lip propriety, is too contained to excite the jaded American audience for gross-out pranks.

Mr. Atkinson is never ferocious or lewd. At his most uninhibited he suggests Jim Carrey playing a refined Briton. In its tongue-in-cheek attitude “Johnny English Reborn” harks back to the relatively polite 1960s and ’70s Bond movies to which it refers compulsively. This film is stocked with amusing spy-movie toys of which the most delightful is a voice-activated Rolls-Royce (updated from “Goldfinger”) that responds to the name Royce by speaking in a seductive woman’s purr. When instructed to “come” (double-entendre intended), the miraculous vehicle obeys by unleashing laser beams and crashing through doors. Other gadgets include a tricked-out wheelchair and a lipstick firearm.The story begins at a Tibetan Buddhist monastery where Johnny, disgraced and stripped of his knighthood after a fiasco in Mozambique (the very word “Mozambique” triggers frantic involuntary flickering of his bushy right eyebrow), is studying martial arts. Through meditation he has learned to sustain vicious kicks to his groin without flinching and to remain poker faced while dragging around a rock roped to his crotch.

Johnny is suddenly called back to MI7, which in his absence has been privatized and renamed Toshiba British Intelligence (a nifty example of product placement spoofing itself?), complete with a corporate slogan, “Spying for You.” The agency’s haughty new boss, code name Pegasus (a deadpan Gillian Anderson), assigns him to Hong Kong to prevent the assassination of the Chinese premier. But before heading into the field he must undergo a high-tech facial scan from the resident behavioral psychologist (Rosamund Pike, the villainous Bond girl Miranda Frost in “Die Another Day”) to whom he takes a fancy. The examination becomes a comic opportunity for an up-close survey of Mr. Atkinson’s facial mobility.Johnny, a snob and a racist, is teamed up with Tucker (Daniel Kaluuya), a smart, black junior agent who good-humoredly endures Johnny’s outrageous condescension as they pursue three assassins known as Vortex. Joining the rat race are his suave colleague Ambrose (Dominic West), whom Johnny idolizes, and a ubiquitous white-haired Asian assassin, identified only as Killer Cleaner (Pik-Sen Lim), who poses as a cleaning woman pushing around a lethal weapon disguised as a vacuum cleaner.

In one scene Johnny tackles a Killer Cleaner look-alike who turns out to be a stand-in for the queen of England.vacuum cleaner price list delhi The movie coasts on the charms of its rubber-faced star and its witty, easygoing set pieces. a vacuum cleaner is plugged into a 120One is a rooftop chase in which Johnny calmly uses an elevator and ladder to catch up with a fleeing villain who leaps out of windows. vax or dyson vacuum cleanerAnother involves an office chair that rises and falls during a meeting at which the British prime minister, whom Johnny has just roundly insulted, sits on his left. Then there is the bouncing body bag with Johnny inside.In the climactic scene at a Swiss mountain retreat Johnny, under the influence of a mind-control drug, reprises classic moments of “The Manchurian Candidate” and “Dr. Strangelove.”

The momentum of “Johnny English Reborn” is sedate, its attention span steady and its running jokes allowed to proceed without interruption. As the movie glides along, it may not elicit explosive laughter, but it plants a steady smile on your face and doesn’t leave you feeling molested. If that’s another way of saying “Johnny English Reborn” is old-fashioned, so be it.This movie is rated PG (Parental guidance suggested). Mild violence and rude humor.Opens on Friday nationwide. Directed by Oliver Parker; written by Hamish McColl, based on a story by William Davies; director of photography, Danny Cohen; edited by Guy Bensley; music by Ilan Eshkeri; production design by Jim Clay; costumes by Beatrix Pasztor; produced by Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner and Chris Clark; released by Universal Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes.WITH: Rowan Atkinson (Johnny English), Gillian Anderson (Pamela Thornton), Dominic West (Simon Ambrose), Rosamund Pike (Kate Sumner), Daniel Kaluuya (Agent Tucker), Richard Schiff (Fisher) and Pik-Sen Lim (Killer Cleaner).

High-resolution, high-density screens are expected on most high-end phones and tablets today. Everything from the iPhone 5 to the Samsung Galaxy S 4 to the Nexus 10 is trying to pack as many pixels as it can into a given screen size to increase the sharpness of on-screen text and images. You often hold a phone or tablet pretty close to your face, so the benefits of a high-resolution, high-density display are easy to see. Perhaps it makes sense then that the technology hasn't been picked up as quickly in laptop computers. To date, there have only been a few serious contenders: Apple's 15-inch and 13-inch Retina MacBook Pros, Google's Chromebook Pixel, and now Toshiba's Kirabook. We're sure that more high-density Windows laptops are on the way, but the Kirabook is the first to make it to market. The laptop raises some natural questions: Does a computer that is both thinner and lighter than the Pixel and the Pros skimp on battery life to achieve these feats? Is the Kirabook good enough to justify its jaw-dropping $1,599.99 starting price?

Most importantly, can Windows support high-density displays as well as OS X, Chrome OS, iOS, Android, and others can? The 2.97-pound Kirabook crams the high-density display of a laptop like the Retina MacBook Pro (3.57 pounds) or Chromebook Pixel (3.35 pounds) into something that weighs about as much as the 13-inch MacBook Air. It's a bit thicker than some other Ultrabooks (0.7" compared to 0.5" for Acer's Aspire S7), but it's still light and very easy to carry around in a bag. Most laptops today are either rectangles or gently rounded rectangles, but the Kirabook splits the difference. Its back corners are rounded and its front corners aren't. This is a simple design touch, but it helps to make the Kirabook easier to identify at a glance. Like other Ultrabooks, it uses a tapered design that's thicker in the back of the laptop (where the system components and fan are located) and thinner in the front, which angles the keyboard slightly toward the user. The laptop's construction is partly "magnesium alloy" and partly plastic.

The lid, palm rest, and keyboard area is all made of a lightly brushed gray metal, while the bottom case is made of plastic that has the same color but no brushed-metal texture. Four round, rubber feet on the bottom of the laptop are also joined by the stereo speaker grilles. The positioning means that sound is amplified slightly by a hard surface like a desk or table but muffled slightly by a soft surface like a couch or lap—either way, the sound quality is as middling as we've come to expect from most Ultrabooks. There's a bit of distortion at higher volume levels. Update: Toshiba tells us that the bottom of the laptop is also made of magnesium alloy and not plastic—it looks and feels more like plastic than either the lid or the palm rest, but they're apparently the same material. I'm told that the lid is pressed magnesium alloy and that the bottom of the laptop is die cast, which accounts for the differences in how they feel. There are also two fan vents on the bottom of the laptop, both used for the laptop's single fan.

During light and general use, fan noise isn't a problem—in a room with light ambient noise the laptop is essentially silent. It's when the hardware starts straining that things get less pleasant. As the device picks up speed its fan sounds more and more like a vacuum cleaner. Finally, the Kirabook has a nice selection of ports for a laptop of its size: three USB 3.0 ports (two on the left and one on the right—one of which can be used to charge a device when the laptop is asleep), a full-size HDMI port, a card reader, and a headphone jack. The Kirabook's keyboard shares similarities with past Toshiba keyboards, but overall the layout is an improvement over what we've seen from the company in the past. Most of the keys are just a bit shorter than they are in other keyboards, but they're just as wide—instead of being square, they're ever-so-slightly rectangular. The bottom row of keys (which includes the spacebar) is slightly taller, and the top row (the function keys, delete key, and a few others) is a little shorter and narrower.

Arrow keys are half-height, as they often are in Ultrabooks. The key sizing and arrangement is very easy to get used to if you're coming from any other chiclet keyboard, and I was quickly able to type at my normal speeds. The quality of the keyboard is also an improvement. Travel is good, and the keys are nice and firm—the mushiness we noticed on last year's crop of Toshiba Ultrabooks is entirely absent. Where the old Toshiba keys were also entirely flat, the Kirabook's are gently scooped to better fit your fingers. The keyboard's backlight is also bright and even. It's important to get the keyboard right when you're making a laptop, and the Kirabook got it right where other Toshiba Ultrabooks have failed. The trackpad shares its shape with the laptop itself. The top edges are curved and the bottom edges are squared off. Aside from this thoughtful design touch, the trackpad is very much like all the other trackpads we've been seeing in Windows laptops lately. It's a single, clickable piece of plastic with a textured surface that supports multiple touch points.

Basic gestures like two-fingered scrolling and pinch-to-zoom work as intended, as do the Windows 8 trackpad gestures. We had no issues with palm rejection. Some specific applications (Chrome, we're looking at you) had trouble with scrolling, but we're more inclined to blame that on Chrome than the Kirabook since other applications were fine. The build quality and design of the Kirabook are generally excellent, but the screen is the real star of the show. At 221 ppi, its 13.3-inch 2560×1440 screen is playing in the same ballpark as the Retina MacBook Pros and the Chromebook Pixel. While it's not the first computer to market with this kind of a screen, it's the first Windows PC to include one (we'll talk more about how Windows handles the pressure in a moment). The display itself is bright and colorful and, as is to be expected, optimized text and images look very crisp. Its viewing angles are worse than what we've seen in other high-end PCs of late, though; colors shift and you'll notice the screen washing out if you bend the screen toward yourself at a 70 or 80 degree angle.

The screen doesn't become unusable unless you're looking at it from an extreme angle, but it's not quite as good as either the Pixel or the Retina MacBook Pros. The hinge is stiff enough that the screen doesn't wobble too much when you reach out to touch it, but not so stiff that it's impossible to lift the lid with one hand. In the higher-priced, $1,799 and $1,999 models, the laptop adds to its list of features a 10-point capacitive touchscreen. The touchscreen uses a layer of Corning's Concore Glass, a scratch-resistant surface which reduces the overall thickness of the screen by integrating the touch layer into the glass itself. This is a bit different from "in-cell" touchscreens we've seen in phones like the iPhone and Galaxy S4, which integrate the touch layer into the LCD display rather than the glass itself (for more information about how modern capacitive touch works, see this article). Corning's marketing materials for Concore imply that its solution is better-suited to larger surfaces, but in both cases the implementation is similar: reduce thickness by integrating the touch layer into one of the others.