Film

Mr Bean's Holiday

Paul Cook 05/04/2007

Rating: 1/5

Rowan Atkinson's latest crack at Hollywood success, in the form of Mr Bean's Holiday, has again, like the subject matter, disastrously failed. After winning a holiday to southern-France Bean sets off only to encounter a number of setbacks. The biggest setback the film runs into from the outset, is that fact that it's so unfunny that one feels embarrassed just watching it.

Attempting to bring Jacques Tati's 'Monsieur Hulot's Holiday' into the modern cinematic age, embodied in the blundering, bewildered Bean, Director Steve Bendelack manages to create such a predictable, clumsy film that almost every minute of it is spent trying to get a cheap laugh after the previous one has been botched.

Momentarily Bean produces a gag that's worthy of a slight chuckle but what is most surprising is how different Bean's Holiday is from the original 1997 film. The slapstick humour has digressed into pathetic face-pulling and the acting has fallen to abysmally low standards. Willem Dafoe might well have thrown his career right down the pan with his appearance in this film.

As a comedy the film falls on its stupidly flexible face in the fact it is truly unfunny. Rowan Atkinson either had no say in the writing at all or was drugged throughout to go along with the appallingly trashy script. The simple and painful truth is that this film is so surprisingly bad that you want to like it but it is impossible.