Movie Review: Mr. Bean's Holiday

“Stupid is as stupid does,” the idiot savant Forrest Gump famously said, and no one makes stupid funnier than Rowan Atkinson as Mr. Bean. Cynical critics may think they have outgrown the era of silent slapstick comedy, but attempting to do it at all is harder and riskier than merely coming up with cheap, vulgar jokes to shock audiences. And Atkinson does it as well as anyone can among modern performers and he deserves comparison with the older silent comic geniuses like Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin.

His second outing, Mr. Bean’s Holiday, finds him on vacation in France after a funny opening scene where he initially doesn’t even realize he’s won a trip to Cannes because he read his lottery number upside down (616, instead of 919). His new toy this time is not a teddy bear, but a small DV camera. Of course, as only Bean can do, he quickly loses his personal belongings and unwittingly becomes responsible for a boy on a train, Stepan (Max Baldry), being separated from his father, Emil (Karel Roden). Thus starts a journey for him to rectify his mistakes and somehow get to his ultimate beach destination.

Though Mr. Bean’s Holiday, his second cinematic outing, is not quite successful as a movie, it is certainly a step up from the first film, Bean, which made the mistake of having too much talking about the plot (though not from Bean, of course, except for a few strange word-like noises) and too little of Bean doing his physical comedy. This one adheres closer to the original series by putting Bean in a strange foreign land, thus yielding more opportunities for lone, awkward situations. And Atkinson continuously scores laughs whether doing a street impersonation of an aria or carrying an outhouse to the middle of the road.

Unfortunately, perhaps in an attempt to make it more family-friendly than the first film’s crude humor, the filmmakers have also made it a little bit too cloying. This is a little jarring considering that the Bean character is actually nastier and more self-centered than the other famous silent clowns like the Tramp. There is nothing wrong with trying to give Bean something of a conscience when he is taking care of Stepan but the bonding of the two characters is pushed too far and made too sugar-syrupy.

Article Author: moviejohn

Joo-Wang John Lee is a computer programmer at Binghamton University by day and a movie critic by hobby. Upon insistent suggestion from people around him, he finally decided to start critiquing movies in writing instead of just verbal form among his friends. …

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