Mr Bean’s Holiday

PG, 85 mins

Sometimes a piece of information is so mind-blowingly unexpected that it leaves you questioning everything you thought you knew about movies. One such nugget is the fact that Gilles Jacob, the president of the Cannes Film Festival and custodian of cinema at its most rarefied and high-brow, is a fan of Mr Bean. We know this because in the latest cinematic outing for the accident-prone irritant, Mr Bean’s Holiday, the action concludes in Cannes at the height of the festival and, remarkably, Jacob gave unprecedented permission for the crew to shoot on the red carpet during one of the glitzy premieres.

Given this apparent endorsement from the great Jacob, is it time to reevaluate a character that has hitherto been considered as a low-water mark in the tide of British cinema?

Certainly, it feels as though this instalment brings Bean to his spiritual home. It has long been a mystery to the British, who consider Bean to be, at best, an ignoble secret weakness, that Rowan Atkinson’s repellent creation is absolutely massive on the Continent. But in the form of Jacques Tati, the French have a template by which to make sense of Bean’s largely silent, havoc-wreaking pratfalls. And Tati’s 1953 hit Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday is an obvious comparison here.

But Tati is not the only cinematic touchstone. Perhaps in a nod to Cannes as a fount of great film, Mr Bean’s Holiday appears to be littered with art-house movie references. This is not something I have noticed in previous Bean adventures although its director Steve Bendelack’s first feature was The League of Gentleman’s Apocalypse, a movie that boasted pop-cultural references in most unexpected places. A scene in which Bean chases a chicken through a chaotic market is lifted from the kinetic opening sequence of the Brazilian film City of God. An old man on a slow-moving moped evokes Lynch’s The Straight Story. And Bean’s haphazard home movie provides a film within a film in the style of that surveillance enthusiast Michael Haneke – fast-forwarding and rewinding the action is another Haneke trick. There’s a possibility that I may be overanalysing at this point.

The film-makers do, however, cross the line from cine-literate referencing to something approaching theft on occasion, with two scenes clumsily borrowed from Tim Burton’s debut film Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. What really riles here is not so much the plagiarism (although shame on you all) but rather the fact that the stolen sight gags – Bean overtaking Tour de France cyclists; Bean in drag to evade a road block – are simply not as funny with Atkinson at the controls.

This is symptomatic of the main problem with the film – the jokes are weak. There’s a complacency to the comedy that suggests that nobody could be bothered. Bean gyrating to Shaggy’s Boombastic is a gag that was past its sell-by date ten years ago.

There is one inventive moment, however, that evokes the fearless physical comedy of the heroes of the silent era. It’s a perfectly choreographed stunt that requires Bean to walk across moving traffic. Unfortunately, coming as it does in the final few minutes of the film, it’s too little too late.

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