The long-awaited second Bean movie, Mr. Bean's Holiday, has a running time of only 83 minutes -- or about 80 minutes too long, as one wag put it at the screening we attended.
One is either a fan of Mr. Bean or one is not, and as actor Rowan Atkinson himself has pointed out, Bean is not a favourite of critics because the humour is too simple. Something like that, anyway.
Give us Blackadder!
In Mr. Bean's Holiday, our hero wins a contest and his prize is a trip to Cannes. Whatever can go wrong on his travels does go wrong; he is taken for a child abductor, among other problems, and he wanders through the landscape with a Russian child in tow, having mistakenly separated the child from his father. Mr. Bean's misadventures are many.
He loses his tickets and passport, gets tossed off a train, chases chickens (don't ask) gets locked in a shed, rides a bike, wanders into the filming of an advertisement and sabotages a movie screening at Cannes.
There are a handful of very funny moments in the movie, most of them dedicated to making fun of pretentious movies and their filmmakers (represented by Willem Dafoe.)
Mr. Bean's holiday footage gets inserted into Dafoe's ridiculous film, to great comic effect. The sequences in Cannes are mostly amusing, and Mr. Bean even gets to meet a girl: Sabine (Emma de Caunes). His amateur filmmaking helps make her a star.
Mostly, though, Bean mugs and grunts for the camera, and very quickly it all wears thin.
Actually, just thinking about Mr. Bean's Holiday long enough to write this review has left us exhausted and drooling. Moreso than usual, anyway.
Children would seem to be the logical audience for Mr. Bean -- he does spit raw oysters into a woman's purse, after all -- but as Rowan Atkinson is often compared to Charlie Chaplin when he takes on this character, it seems safe to say that the fans are of every age.
We are not among them.
It doesn't matter.
Mr. Bean doesn't need us for his movie to become No. 1 all over Europe and to rake in the hundreds of millions at the box office.
Chacun a son gout.
(This film is rated G)
More Movie Reviews
