Mr. Bean's Holiday (2007)

Mr. Bean's Holiday arrives as a stand-alone sequel to a 1997 film that most of us had already forgotten, and it deposits Rowan Atkinson's silent man-child on a raffle-funded journey to Cannes. The plot is a chain of misunderstandings: a missed train, a separated Russian boy, a lost wallet, a chicken with a bus ticket stuck to its foot. Whole stretches pass without dialogue. The comedy is physical, borrowed openly from Jacques Tati and Pee-wee Herman, and it argues nothing. There is no thesis here, no lesson, no invitation to reconsider our assumptions about our fellow citizens. A man falls off a bicycle. That is the entire proposition.

The film's only target is the film industry itself, and it aims gently. Willem Dafoe's Carson Clay presides over a garish yogurt commercial featuring Nazi soldiers, and later over a self-serious festival picture that the audience greets with open indifference. This is affectionate ribbing of pretentious cinema, not an economic critique. The cast is a polyglot assembly of British, French and Russian performers, which reflects the geography of a European road trip instead of any casting mandate. Race never surfaces. Neither does anything else of ideological weight. The cultural friction is entirely linguistic, played for a laugh about a man who says "Gracias" to the French.

Classification proves straightforward. Across the ten markers examined, the film registers near zero, with faint traces of national variety in the ensemble and a mild jab at commercial filmmaking. One reviewer confessed difficulty laughing at a character she suspected was autistic, an observation the film neither invites nor develops. This is a slapstick travelogue with a mime at its center. It seeks nothing and preaches nothing, and in that narrow respect it is almost admirable.