Mr Bean's Holiday

ENDLESSLY repeated on television and on long-haul flights, the Mr Bean series worked reasonably well as a series of sketches strung together over half an hour as the hapless title character blundered his way through one mishap after another.

Stretching this concept into the full-length movie, Bean (1997) made for trying viewing but proved lucrative. The only surprise is that it's taken 10 years to produce a follow-up, which Rowan Atkinson insists is his last outing in the role.

That promise is the best news about Mr Bean's Holiday, which opens on a wet June day in London, where the twit wins a church raffle. The prize is a trip to Cannes and a video camera to record the inevitable disasters that will befall him along the way. The title unwisely invokes comparisons with Jacques Tati's far superior, similarly themed comedy, M Hulot's Holiday.

The dialogue is minimal, which is just as well given that the only French words Bean knows are oui, non and gracias. The best visual gag comes early (and features prominently in the trailer), when he has lunch in a Paris restaurant. Under the gaze of an imperious maitre d', Bean consumes a platter of shellfish, including the shells.

The wispy storyline involves Bean linking up with the young son (Max Baldry) of a Russian film director and being suspected of abducting the boy. He also meets a friendly French actress (Emma de Caunes) and disrupts the elaborate set of a yoghurt commercial directed by a vain, pretentious US filmmaker (Willem Dafoe). Bean finally arrives in Cannes during the film festival, and there is a mildly inventive visual gag as he walks down across vehicles of descending heights.

The movie is mostly as irritating as Bean himself. One suspects that the missing ingredient is the comic flair of screenwriter Richard Curtis, who devised the series with Atkinson and is credited solely as an executive producer on the film.

However, bearing in mind the popularity of the TV series and the earlier Bean movie, there is evidently an audience that will be far more entertained than I was as Atkinson goes through a succession of grotesque facial contortions - rolling and squinting his eyes, arching his ears, wrinkling his nose.

As Mr Bean would not say, chacun à son goût.