Mr Bean's Holiday
2007, directed by Steve Bendelack, starring Rowan Atkinson, Emma De Caunes, Willem Dafoe, Max Baldry

Right I admit straight away that while for me Rowan Atkinson has created some great comedy characters, Mr Bean is not one of them. Okay he's palatable in small doses, 20 minutes or so especially if raising money for say Comic Relief, when he does provide the odd laugh-out-loud moment. But an hour and a half in a cinema? Not a hope, to use an old analogy watching this was 90 minutes I'll never get back.

The concept is that our hapless hero wins a holiday to Cannes but even before he's left Paris he manages to lock a French man out of a train, said man's son within, and spends the rest of the movie trying to reunite them. What follows is pretty humourless and thoroughly predictable Bean slapstick, the basic premise a French vocabulary that consists of "oui", "non" and "gracias". The first time it's reasonably funny, the fifth, and sixth...

Whatever possessed the likes of Willem Dafoe and Emma De Caunes (who for "Where have I seen her before?" fans is a lesser-known French actress and not the Gallic detective in the BBC series "Waking The Dead") to cheapen themselves as stooges to Bean's banality is beyond me. It's been 10 years between Bean's first and second movie outings, let's hope it's at least that long until the next one – permanent retirement would be even better...