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Mr. Bean's Holiday

An uncalled-for sequel

By CHRIS WANGLER | August 22, 2007

1.5 Stars

VIDEO: Watch the trailer for Mr. Bean's Holiday.

A cash grab for all involved, this uncalled-for sequel arrives 10 years after the first Mr. Bean movie, and long after Rowan Atkinson’s rubber-faced, classically inspired routine reached its zenith. On a holiday to Cannes won in a church raffle, our bumbling hero rudely devours an unwieldy seafood platter (lightly funny), mimes a Puccini aria for bus fare (sort of funny), and dresses up in drag (utterly not funny). The painfully long and episodic skits detract from some interesting satire about the movie business (e.g., the French must cope with American arrogance in the person of a self-important festival director played by Willem Dafoe). Director Steve Bendelack, whose coda is an ensemble performance of Charles Trenet’s classic song “La mer,” obviously respects the past, but he appears to be on a holiday of his own — from any faintly realistic notion about his audience.

Related: An Italian feast, Smoke screens, Paul Schrader at the HFA, More

An Italian feast
A group of performers — especially one unified by gender and culture — is an unconventional focus for a film series.
Smoke screens
What does it say about America that marijuana movies are a hot genre right now, perhaps hotter even than in the heyday of Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong’s 1978 Up in Smoke ?
Paul Schrader at the HFA
"I'm not sure what happened to me," says Paul Schrader's Patty Hearst, one of the least reliable of the director's succession of unreliable narrators, in the film named for her.
Sweet tooth
I hope the estate of Leonard Bernstein is collecting royalties for The Little Prince . Rachel Portman’s unremittingly sweet and relentlessly lilting score for this children’s opera based on Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s famous story borrows heavily from Bernstein’s Candide and West Side Story .
Paris je t'aime
The concept for this anthology was a short film representing each of Paris’s 20 arrondissements, from the Jardins des Tuileries (#1) to the Cimitière du Père Lachaise (#20).
Off with their heads
The signs are getting bleak for the man in the White House and the party in power.
Lowbrow fun
Outdoor summer performances have so much going against them.
Manderlay
Lars von Trier’s Manderlay has something to offend everyone: blacks, whites, conservatives, liberals, and those who, like myself, found Dogville a bold if flawed experiment.
Keeping Mum
In Niall Johnson’s minor but enjoyable British black comedy, Maggie Smith is a Mary Poppins–like houseservant with a penchant for homicide who’s the new hire, out in the provinces, of a British family in distress. Watch the trailer for Keeping Mum (QuickTime)
Country for old men
A youthful 80-year-old Sir Colin Davis was back in front of the Boston Symphony Orchestra last weekend with one of the pieces he loves most.
Oliver's army
While he refers to himself as a “dramatist” rather than a historian, Stone has positioned himself as Hollywood’s gatekeeper to America’s post-war past. Feel-good movie of the summer: Oliver Stone: from the Hollywood crackpot of JFK to the Republican sellout of World Trade Center. By Peter Keough Off-Center: Oliver Stone's trite take on 9/11. By Peter Keough
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Topics: Reviews , Giacomo Puccini, Willem Dafoe, Charles Trenet, More

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