DVD REVIEW: "Mr. Bean's Holiday"

I'm wagering that Rowan Atkinson spent a lot of time studying the great French comedian Jacques Tati, particularly Tati's masterpiece, "Mr. Hulot's Holiday." I'm also betting that that Mr. Atkinson watched Tati get into all kinds of mishaps and said to himself, "Gee I can do that."

And he was right. He can. But he forgot or couldn't grasp or simply failed to put his arms around what made Tati so special. Tati was endearing, charming, a man whose heart was always in the right place even when his body wasn't. Atkinson is like olives. I understand a lot of people like olives. I'm not one of them.

In this reprisal of Atkinson's Mr. Bean character, the bumbling idiot wins a raffle that awards him a vacation on the French Riviera. That, dear friends, is the last good thing that happens to him. Oh, well, I really shouldn't say that. He does get to meet a plunky kid, Max Baldry, and a lovely actress, Emma de Caunes (the three are pictured above), for whom the word spunky was invented. But he meets them both, especially the kid, in a cruel manner. And he gets into situations that anyone with even the slightest dash of intelligence could have either avoided completely or stopped before they got out of hand.

Tati always got laughs when mishaps befell him as he tried to help his fellow man. Atkinson, on the other hand ..., well let me describe just one scene that will illustrate the point. Bean is in a French restaurant and is served oysters on the half shell, which, to some, I guess, are like olives. Bean acts like he's never seen an oyster before. The waiter encourages Bean to slurp the oysters from their shell, but instead Bean hides them in the folds of his napkin and then finds an opportune time to dump them in the purse of a woman sitting at the table next to him. The laughs are supposed to come when the woman's mobile phone rings and she reaches into her purse to answer it. Yuck! Yuck!

There are two funny moments in the film, however. The first is Bean's interpretation of an opera as he and the kid are begging for money on the streets of a French village. The second is when that well-known funnyman Willem Dafoe (Aren't you just howling at the very mention of his name?), playing a movie director, pompously introduces his new film at the Cannes Film Festival and his name appears four times in the movie's opening credits that are displayed over a closeup of him on a moving sidewalk. Then he sits in the audience oblivious as all those around him are falling asleep during the screening.

If only the movie had more moments of genuine satire like this.

Grade: C+