Last night, the Blushing Bride and I sat down to enjoy this gem birthed out of British Comedy. I've always liked Bean, his nine year old trapped in a thirty-year-old body antics are consistently endearing. In my opinion, Bean is by far Rowan Atkinson's best character (although he did put in a sleeper of a performance in The Rat Race).

Mr. Bean's Holiday is good but not spectacular. The Bean character tends to get slow after about twenty minutes, so an hour and a half can drag at times. So on to the highlights--

Mr. Bean wins the raffle of a holiday trip to Cannes. Along the way he stumbles into an expensive (but grotesque) meal, a taxi ride to the opposite end of Paris, but with the help of his trusty compass walks across the city (in a straight line--through traffic), and all in his happily oblivious state.

Bean meets and befriends a young Russian boy, whose father is in Cannes to help judge the film festival, and an aspiring actress who doesn't understand how short her career is . . . until she meets Bean. And all Mr. Bean wants to do is get to the beach (losing his money and his passport along the way).

Especially entertaining to me was getting to hear the little boy speak in slow clear Russian -- I was kind of homesick for the former Soviet Union. The plot was okay, but slow-moving. There was plenty of entertainment for about twenty minutes of Bean-esque fun. Die-hard fans of Atkinson or Mr. Bean will want to get a copy of this, others will want to take a pass.