Review by Peter Veugelaers

This is one chaotic holiday I’d like to avoid. The distance between the viewer and the screen is enough to remain aloof, thankfully. It is a holiday to enjoyably soak in from a distance.

And it is understandable that the traveller, a certain Mr Bean (Rowan Atkinson), fits the bill nicely as the bumbling misfit on his way to the South of France for a holiday he won in a church fundraising exercise.

Armed with a video camera, the clichéd jokes start coming before the story sets off. It’s not a promising start.

When Bean gets a local on the same train trip to film him by the train station, the train subsequently leaves the local behind, but his boy and Bean go en route.

Bean tries to placate the boy with funny faces, the funniest of the jokes so far. Then, together they try and find the father which shapes up into a series of mishaps.

The laughs get progressively better. There are some clever scenes, which didn’t make me laugh-out-loud, but they’re still amusingly good – two sequences come to mind involving a pretentious film director/producer (played by Willem Dafoe).

The comedy is a mix of the tired cliché and the amusing with the good, but the end result of this well crafted and unassuming comedy is hilarious. Mr Bean’s essential character traits, including his inability to talk, are deftly handled with good comic timing.

Mr Bean will be the draw card for younger audiences, and this is wholesome viewing. The grown up themes, which are misplaced by the underlining feel of the movie, might find the adults nodding their heads in agreement, or not.

The best part of Mr Bean’s Holiday (PG – adult themes) is how the entire feel and tone of the piece is happy and joyous, including the attractiveness of budding actress cum star Bean picks up along the way, played by French actress Emma de Caunes.