Movie Log: Mr. Bean's Holiday

On Saturday, a local movie house was showing Raiders of the Lost Ark on the big screen...but I couldn't convince the boys to go see it. (I may also have been a bit conflicted because I don't remember how violent and/or creepy it is.) So the movie we three saw this weekend was Mr. Bean's Holiday, which of course doesn't compare but is successful enough on its own terms.

Mr. Bean is a character Rowan Atkinson created for an early-90s TV series, reprised in one movie ten years ago, and has announced he won't play anymore. Bean is an ill-fated British man of few words but a boundless ability to get in trouble. The character feels like a throwback to the days of silent comedy, where a movie's hero couldn't see a ladder without getting tangled in it and flying objects inevitably hit someone in the face.

In this movie, Bean wins a Cannes holiday in a church raffle, and of course trouble ensues. He comes face-to-face with French cuisine, gets lost, and inadvertently ruins another traveler's laptop...and that's just the movie cracking its knuckles and getting ready for the plot to start. The real plot starts when Bean accidentally causes a man to miss his train, and then meets the man's son on the train. The two of them soon miss a train themselves, and the usual catalog of odd types of transportation ensues. A pretty young French actress eventually joins them, the kind who would be a love interest in a normal movie. (But it's impossible to picture Bean having any sort of romance.) And it all ends at the Cannes Film Festival, during the premiere of a movie.

This is nearly a catalogue of physical comedy -- I don't remember any hanging-high-above-the-street stunts, but I might be forgetting something -- and most of it is pretty funny, for people who like that sort of thing. (It's not quite slapstick, usually, but it's definitely physical rather than verbal comedy.) I wish Atkinson would do more work along the lines of the Blackadder TV series, but that was nearly twenty years ago, so I should probably stop complaining.

As I said, I took my kids to see this, and both I and they enjoyed it. It's not a movie that will live for the ages, but it's funny, and, sometimes, that's enough.