Hey kiddies. Capone in Chicago here.

Although it has been 10 years since Rowan Atkinson dazzled us with BEAN, he hasn't been sitting around doing nothing in all that time. He took time out to make the astonishing Bond parody JOHNNY ENGLISH and put in supporting roles in such films as Richard Curtis's LOVE ACTUALLY (one shouldn't forget that Curtis is one of the creators and original writers of the Mr. Bean character) and Keeping Mum. Hopefully a small fraction of my sarcasm is seeping through, but in all honestly, I remember finding the original "Mr. Bean" shorts pretty damn funny. The 1997 film was a disaster, but this latest entry, MR. BEAN'S HOLIDAY, is much closer in spirit and comic style to the shorts. Under the direction of Steve Bendelack (who helmed nearly all of the "League of Gentleman" episodes as well as that team's Apocalypse movie), it's still not a particularly inspired film but there are at least some laughs contained within.

In this installment of his life, Bean wins a trip to cross-country trip to France with the ultimate destination being Cannes during the city's famed film festival. Only under these circumstances would Mr. Bean be at the Cannes Film Festival. The film is essentially a collection of small adventures as Bean loses his traveling papers and somehow gets saddled with the son of a German director, who just happens to be on the jury of the festival. By pairing Bean with the young man (played by Max Baldry), the filmmakers beg comparisons to Chaplin's THE KID. I don't respond well to begging, so I'm not taking that bait. The pair eventually hooks up with an aspiring actress (Emma de Caunes of THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP and MA MERE), who (coincidentally) has a film in which she appears at the festival. Perhaps the most shocking cameo is that of the legendary French actor Jean Rochefort, who has been making films since the 1950s. Here, he plays a maitre'd in a high-end restaurant in one of the film's funnier sequences.

Another pretty startling appearance is that of Willem Dafoe as the pushy, egocentric American director (is there any other kind?) Carson Clay, whose film premieres at Cannes on the day Bean and his crew arrives. Since the film is set in France, it immediately made me think of a far worse film of late also set in that nation -- Steve Martin's PINK PANTHER remake. Yes, I'm going out on a limb and saying definitively that MR. BEAN'S HOLIDAY is better than THE PINK PANTHER remake. That rumble you feel is the earth changing direction on its axis.

Atkinson has certain provided me with plenty of laughs with both his television and film work, but Mr. Bean stretched out to even a paltry 80 minutes feels too long. But before I go, I should, in the interest of full disclosure, leave you with two pieces of information. The crowd with whom I saw this film was roaring with laughter almost the entire time; and this film has already played in most other countries around the world and raked in somewhere in the neighborhood of $185 million dollars.

As with so many other things, the United States is clearly completely out of step with the rest of the planet. If you ever found Mr. Bean to be an amusing character, you could do a whole lot worse than MR. BEAN'S HOLIDAY.

Capone