Mr. Bean's Holiday: Critic Reviews

Atkinson's goofball grotesquerie never lets up.

Rowan Atkinson continues a tradition that in the right hands never gets stale: comic pantomime.

There are innumerable set pieces, most of which take an awfully long time to deliver an awfully weak gag.

The film, set mostly in France, pays homage to Jacques Tati, but the mostly silent gags feel like watered-down Bean.

Do you Bean? If you do Bean, rejoice. Bean is back. If you don't Bean, here's a chance to start. Bean now, or forever hold your peace.

Somewhere, Jacques Tati is smiling.

If you've never been particularly fond of Atkinson's brand of slapstick, you certainly won't be converted by this trifle.

Don't mistake this simpleton hero, or the movie's own simplicity, for a lack of smarts. Mr. Bean's Holiday is quite savvy about filmmaking, landing a few blows for satire.

For younger audiences, Mr. Bean's Holiday will be a pleasure, and of course, Bean addicts will, as always, be happy to see Atkinson's alter ego return to the big screen.

Too often in Mr. Bean's Holiday, you get the feeling Rowan Atkinson and his collaborators confused the notion of 'building a gag slowly' with 'forgetting to build one at all'.

Director Bendelack and writer-producer McBurney aim for the comedy of Chaplin, Keaton, and Tati, relying heavily on sight gags and their star's pratfalls and facial contortions, but they vititate the comic payoffs by allowing scenes to run too long.

The film's Harold Lloyd-inspired slapstick may be infantile, but it has an innocent sensibility that is a nice counterbalance to the equally childish but prurient American Pie flicks.

Mr. Bean's Holiday doesn't try for too much, but in the crass and noisy theme park that is children's entertainment, it's as refreshing as icewater on a summer day.

A refreshingly blunt reminder of the simple roots of comedy in these grim, overly manufactured times.

Among the pluses: Atkinson is a gifted physical comedian. And the film is a rarity: a kid-friendly movie that was clearly not produced as a vehicle for selling toys and video games.

Pic's film-buffy slant, with a finale at the Cannes Film Festival, won't mean much to the ankle-biting segment of Bean's audience.

Mr. Bean's Holiday picks up steam when it finally arrives in Cannes just in time to wreak yet more havoc at the big film festival, but getting there is pretty tedious. A little of the wildly mugging Atkinson goes a long way.

If Brit comic Rowan Atkinson really is retiring his greatest creation, he's certainly kissing him off in style with this glossy, often charming road picture that has none of the coarse or crass tone of the Hollywood hit Bean of 10 years ago.

Bean seems to lament how some filmmakers have forgotten that film is foremost a medium of mass entertainment. The great sadness is that without uttering much of anything, is a few jokes short of making a very good point.

The humour in Mr. Bean's Holiday, more chucklesome than uproarious, doesn't feel particularly contemporary. It has the kind of simplicity that's most likely to appeal to either the old or young.

Atkinson's Mr. Bean, a man of few words, carries their memory in his rubbery bones. When it comes to knowing where he came from, he's got the beat.

The old Mr. Bean was a lot funnier than this one. It's a combination of things: lackluster writing (neither Richard Curtis nor Mel Smith returned this time), a lack of energy, and curiously poor timing for some of the jokes.

While the film is amusing, it is disappointing that Atkinson appears content to play it safe. It would have been fun to see him aim higher.

While Mr. Bean's Holiday is hardly a memorable vacation, Atkinson proves an agreeably silly tour guide.