Mr. Bean's Holiday is the movie equivalent of a nuclear bomb: the fallout from this bomb will kill any goodwill you might have towards the character of Mr. Bean. It takes a special kind of movie to make you hate other movies, but this one accomplishes that so effortlessly that I was left seriously questioning what I ever saw in Rowan Atkinson's creation in the first place. Simply put, you can't watch this movie and not look at 1997's Bean or the old Mr. Bean TV show the same way again.Something we should address from the get-go: I was (and in theory still am) a fan of the first Mr. Bean movie. It was an acquired taste, to be sure, but it had a fun combination of slapstick, bizarreness, and British humor. This film throws all that out and tries to start over, taking the sequel in a completely different direction. It gave me a bit of perspective on why I found the original so funny:
1. People realized Mr. Bean was unstable and frighteningly strange, and they called him out on it (and even arrested him for it).
2. Bean had a straight-man to play off of, who was constantly shocked at how idiotic Bean could be.
3. There was an attempt at a plot.
I'm quite sure there was more to it than that, but those three will suffice in helping me explain this atrocity. Most frustrating, people don't seem too shocked by the things Bean is doing. For better or worse, he works as a character because he was always a fantasy character placed in the real world. Here he may as well be living in a fantasy world as no one bats an eye at half the things he does. Which brings me to my next point: there's no straight-man.
How many times in your life can you honestly say "This movie sure could use some Peter MacNicol" with a straight face? Apparently the answer is now "at least once." With no one to play off of Bean's zaniness, it gets pretty excruciating. And let me clue you in to a little secret: Mr. Bean has never been a very verbal character. So with no real sidekick here, it quickly becomes apparent what you're watching: a silent movie. Towards the end he meets up with a young woman who talks to him, but otherwise Bean rarely speaks, even to the young boy he meets and befriends. And last I checked, there wasn't really a market for silent movies.
The plot is nonexistent. Bean wins a trip to France and he decides to visit the beach. Since he's Mr. Bean, it takes him 90 minutes to find the beach. Along the way he helps a kid reunite with his lost dad, and he screws up the Cannes film festival. The first film may not have had a brilliant plot, but it had something to keep you interested. Here it's nothing more than a string of bad skits. And these skits made something abundantly clear: Rowan Atkinson is deeply depressed.
Atkinson always seemed to be having fun with this character in the past. Here he seems tired and sad, like he realized that he's doomed to be Mr. Bean forever. Perhaps that's why this film is so bad: he wants people to stop asking him for more Bean, so he made the worst possible film he could. After this film people will be asking for Bean III about as much as they were asking for another Batman film after Batman & Robin or another Cadyshack after Cadyshack II. Because really, I have not come out of a movie this disheartened in a long time.
RIP Mr. Bean.
