Mr. Bean's Holiday

It's really quite simple. If you're a Mr. Bean fan, you're likely to go see Mr. Bean's holiday. If you aren't, you won't. Same with the critics, it seems. If they already have favorably reviewed the past Mr. Bean movies, they'll like to do the same with this one. Bill Zwecker in the Chicago Sun-Times writes a full disclosure at the beginning of his review that he's "an unabashed Mr. Bean fan." And while noting that the pace of the movie is sometimes "off-kilter" (the same can be said for the earlier movies and the Mr. Bean TV shows), he concludes, "Bean addicts will, as always, be happy to see Atkinson's alter ego return to the big screen." Ty Burr in the Boston Globe remarks that the movie is "a throwback to a strain of gentle, purely visual Euro-slapstick that has all but died out in the past few decades. Even when the movie's coming up empty, you're glad it's in there pitching." On the other hand, Kevin Crust in the Los Angeles Times finds the movie no more than an expanded version of a Mr. Bean TV show. "Many of the sequences are labored and feel drawn out to justify a feature-length running time. There's maybe 20 minutes' worth of smiles here and only a couple of big laughs," he writes. Clearly Claudia Puig in USA Today was hardly amused at all, writing, "If you've been lobotomized or have the mental age of a kindergartener, Mr. Bean's Holiday is viable comic entertainment. Otherwise, there are far better ways to spend 90 minutes of your time."