STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning
At a renowned art gallery in Los Angeles, a major event in the shape of the unveiling of one of the most famous American portraits of all time, Whistler's Mother, is about to happen. But the yanks need an art expert from Britain to come over and give an analysis of the painting, so they call on their friends in The Royal National Gallery of Art in London to send over one of their finest experts on the subject. Unfortunately for them, the heads of the gallery are more interested in using this as an opportunity to rid themselves of their most inept and detested employee Mr Bean (Rowan Atkinson) passing him off as an expert and sending him across the pond to the care of Dr Langley (Peter MacNicol.) Intently interested in Bean and what he's got to say, the poor man and his family have no idea what they have just let themselves in for as disaster and calamity ensue before the big day of the unveiling.
Mr Bean the series certainly enjoyed a huge following over here but I'm surprised it sustained a big enough following to warrant such a big budget production as this. I'm not sure how well this did in the states or on which side of the pond most of the filming took place on but whatever way you look at it, this just takes the concept of the series and mangles it up rather, leaving us with a film that nowhere near manages to capture the magic and charm that the series did. It's funny in places, but generally this has added more of an American edge to the Bean formula which misunderstands the humour of Bean. In the series, it was never that Bean was an outright idiot- he was just a man who perceived the world a little differently to everyone else and tended to do things his own way, sometimes with catastrophic consequences. Here he is presented as a typical sort of slow-minded dolt of the sort you see trotted out in many American comedy films, robbing him of his distinctively innocent edge that carried him through the series.
Other things aren't right with the film too, including the naff plot and script which are flawed and fail to hold together. The film will make you laugh in places but it mostly mangles the humour of what makes Bean Bean and is funny because of this, not what made Bean so great in the first place. **
At a renowned art gallery in Los Angeles, a major event in the shape of the unveiling of one of the most famous American portraits of all time, Whistler's Mother, is about to happen. But the yanks need an art expert from Britain to come over and give an analysis of the painting, so they call on their friends in The Royal National Gallery of Art in London to send over one of their finest experts on the subject. Unfortunately for them, the heads of the gallery are more interested in using this as an opportunity to rid themselves of their most inept and detested employee Mr Bean (Rowan Atkinson) passing him off as an expert and sending him across the pond to the care of Dr Langley (Peter MacNicol.) Intently interested in Bean and what he's got to say, the poor man and his family have no idea what they have just let themselves in for as disaster and calamity ensue before the big day of the unveiling.
Mr Bean the series certainly enjoyed a huge following over here but I'm surprised it sustained a big enough following to warrant such a big budget production as this. I'm not sure how well this did in the states or on which side of the pond most of the filming took place on but whatever way you look at it, this just takes the concept of the series and mangles it up rather, leaving us with a film that nowhere near manages to capture the magic and charm that the series did. It's funny in places, but generally this has added more of an American edge to the Bean formula which misunderstands the humour of Bean. In the series, it was never that Bean was an outright idiot- he was just a man who perceived the world a little differently to everyone else and tended to do things his own way, sometimes with catastrophic consequences. Here he is presented as a typical sort of slow-minded dolt of the sort you see trotted out in many American comedy films, robbing him of his distinctively innocent edge that carried him through the series.
Other things aren't right with the film too, including the naff plot and script which are flawed and fail to hold together. The film will make you laugh in places but it mostly mangles the humour of what makes Bean Bean and is funny because of this, not what made Bean so great in the first place. **