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 enlarge | Director: Steve Bendelack
Actors: Rowan Atkinson, Steve Pemberton, Lily Atkinson, Preston Nyman, Sharlit Deyzac
Studio: Universal Studios
Category: DVD
List Price: $14.98
Buy Used: $2.99
You Save: $11.99 (80%)
New (56) Used (34) Collectible (1) from $2.99
Rating:  80 reviews
Sales Rank: 4835
Format: Ac-3, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, Dvd-video, Subtitled, Widescreen, Ntsc
Languages: English (Original Language), French (Original Language), Russian (Original Language), Spanish (Original Language), English (Subtitled), French (Subtitled), Spanish (Subtitled), French (Dubbed)
Rating: G (General Audience)
Number Of Items: 1
Running Time: 90
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 7.5 x 5.4 x 0.6
MPN: 61033330
UPC: 025193333025
EAN: 0025193333025
ASIN: B000WOQKCQ
Theatrical Release Date: August 24, 2007
Release Date: November 27, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
| Showing reviews 76-80 of 80 | | « PREV 1 ... | | |
 Funny at times, but not what I expected..... September 1, 2007
19 out of 23 found this review helpful
The long-awaited second Bean movie, Mr. Bean's Holiday, has a running time of only 83 minutes -- or about 80 minutes too long, as one wag put it at the screening we attended.
One is either a fan of Mr. Bean or one is not, and as actor Rowan Atkinson himself has pointed out, Bean is not a favourite of critics because the humour is too simple. Something like that, anyway.
In Mr. Bean's Holiday, our hero wins a contest and his prize is a trip to Cannes. Whatever can go wrong on his travels does go wrong; he is taken for a child abductor, among other problems, and he wanders through the landscape with a Russian child in tow, having mistakenly separated the child from his father. Mr. Bean's misadventures are many.
He loses his tickets and passport, gets tossed off a train, chases chickens (don't ask) gets locked in a shed, rides a bike, wanders into the filming of an advertisement and sabotages a movie screening at Cannes.
There are a handful of very funny moments in the movie, most of them dedicated to making fun of pretentious movies and their filmmakers (represented by Willem Dafoe.)
Mr. Bean's holiday footage gets inserted into Dafoe's ridiculous film, to great comic effect. The sequences in Cannes are mostly amusing, and Mr. Bean even gets to meet a girl: Sabine (Emma de Caunes). His amateur filmmaking helps make her a star.
Mostly, though, Bean mugs and grunts for the camera, and very quickly it all wears thin.
 Woderful Movie! August 31, 2007
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
I just watched this movie on HD DVD and I loved it.Yeah I scene alot of negative reviews on Mr.Bean's Holiday.But for me I guess I just like bad movies.I thought Mr.Bean's Holiday was alot of fun and funny,and it's a clean movie.I was able to get an HD DVD copy of this movie-Yeah it's already out on DVD and HD DVD in the UK.Well anyways I was able to watch the movie in the comfort of my home and in High Def.And I'm sure my copy will be watched lots time. I found nothing negative about this movie.
Wonderful movie!!!! August 30, 2007
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
This movie is fantastic, i don't know what the other two reviewers were thinking. It manages to be hysterically funny and at the same time very touching and sweet. It has a great supporting cast too. It's much better than bean:the movie, because it does in fact, have a plot. It's exactly the oppisite of events strung together, as Bean:The movie was. This movie has a wonderful story line that keeps the audience laughing and crying at the same time.
One of the best movie's i have seen in a very long time.
 Such A Letdown From The Television Series August 27, 2007
8 out of 24 found this review helpful
I am a huge fan of the British Television series "Mr. Bean", created by Rowan Atkinson and Richard Curtis (who would go on to write "Four Weddings and a Funeral" and write and direct "Love, Actually). The series, available on DVD and shown on PBS stations from time to time, follows the adventures of Mr. Bean (Atkinson), a largely silent, slightly bitter, single British man, who finds himself in various predicaments. Because the character is largely silent, he gets into a variety of situations leading to a lot of physical comedy. And he is largely reminiscent of great comedians like Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton.
A few years ago, they made a film called simply "Bean", which was released in Europe before it came to the United States. A huge hit, the film was scheduled for release in later summer here in America and quickly flopped. It's easy to see why the character is such a draw in Europe; because he almost never speaks, it isn't a lot of work to translate his dialogue for foreign countries. Everyone understands physical humor. "Bean" was a dreadful film. The story quickly builds a pretense of getting the character to Los Angeles where he interacts with his host family and their two `adorable' kids and Burt Reynolds plays a supporting role. The film chose to replay a number of situations from the series and added two kids, who could, presumably, relate to the overgrown child in Bean. It didn't work.
When I first saw the trailer for "Mr. Bean's Holiday", the newest film featuring the Rowan Atkinson creation, I was intrigued. It seemed to be a thinly veiled re-working of the Jacques Tati classic "Mr. Hulot's Holiday" with the Bean character taking the place of Mr. Hulot. Jacques Tati's films are also significant for their sparing use of dialogue and it seemed like the translation might lead to more success.
I was very naive.
"Holiday" starts promisingly. Bean (Atkinson) speeds his little Mini Cooper to a broken down church barely making the announcement of the winner of their big raffle. As it is June in England, the torrential rain is dampening everyone's sprits and Bean is especially eager to win an expense paid trip to the sunny beaches of Cannes. He wins and he has a couple of amusing moments at the beginning of the journey. After he arrives in Paris, and finds the train to Cannes, he asks a gentleman to take some video of him boarding the train. The gentleman misses the train and Bean soon realizes the man's young son has been left behind on the train. Bean realizes he has to help reunite them and they set off on a trip across France, trying to get to Cannes. Along the way, they cross paths with an American film director (Willem Dafoe) who is also on his way to the Cannes Film Festival and the young French actress (Emma de Caunes) he is courting.
"Mr. Bean's Holiday" misfires on just about every count. Even the amusing situations he gets involved in on the train to Paris, at the beginning of his journey, are just that, amusing. They aren't so funny you will forever remember them forever, or so funny they redeem the film, they only manage to create a smile. The best of these is when Bean wanders into a restaurant at Gare Du Lyon, because he has some time to kill before taking the train to Cannes, he decides to eat a meal. He inadvertently orders a Platter Fruit De Mer from the Maitre' D (Jean Rochefort, "The Man on the Train") and is shocked to find a huge platter of oysters and large prawns, complete with eyes, delivered to his table. Atkinson is a gifted comedian with an extremely expressive face and we instantly feel his pain when he eats his first raw oyster.
But this same gifted comedian can't help make other scenes more than slightly amusing. For instance, he tires to amuse the boy on the train by pasting pieces of paper on his eyelids and tongue and make them move around. This is just creepy. Later, he interrupts a screening of a film at the Cannes Film Festival in a protracted bit of unfunny business, which points to a very obvious joke.
Why do these films fall so flat? It seems a shame they attempt to make these films appeals to such a broad audience. In each, Bean is paired with precocious children in a blatant attempt to both appeal to this demographic and point out the obvious comparisons between Bean's character and the children. "Holiday" is rated G because it contains nothing that could be considered even slightly racy or daring. But I think little kids will be bored by Bean's relatively low-key antics.
One of the great things about the show is Bean was usually a little bitter about how put upon he felt. He felt entitled to certain things and when he didn't get them, he became slightly exasperated. In the films, the attempts to make him universally appealing have robbed him of this aspect of his character and simply serve to make him boring.
There are two very funny moments in "Holiday". At one point, Bean begins to karaoke or pantomime to an aria from an opera as people walking through a French market stop to watch. Later, Willem Dafoe's American director premieres his latest film at the Cannes Film Festival and we get to see snippets of the overly pretentious piece of crap he has created and is so clearly in love with.
But these moments are few and far between and it takes a long time to get there and a long time after they happen until the film finally ends. When the film does finally end, you feel a sense of relief. You no longer need to wait, hoping something, anything funny might happen. Sure, it is a wait in vain, but you never give up hope.
"Mr. Bean's Holiday" isn't funny enough, amusing enough or clever enough to warrant your money or time. That's sad because Rowan Atkinson is a very funny guy and Mr. Bean has provided some hilarious moments on his television series. Rent that on DVD instead.
Still Has Much To Say With His Silence August 26, 2007
9 out of 14 found this review helpful
Oh Mr. Bean, what are we going to do with you? For years Rowan Atkinson's Mr. Bean character has been a worldwide sensation. You'll always hear that laughter may be the universal cure for sickness, but to find something that everyone would find funny...now THAT is the challenge! Somehow, being a man of few words, Mr. Bean has been the universal character that people all over the world love. It's not hard to see why. I always found it impressive that a character who speaks so few words (if, indeed, he speaks at all) manages to make me laugh so hard I want to bust a gut. Comparisons to Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton are not uncalled for. In fact, they are actually a very accurate way of describing Mr. Bean, and his new movie "Mr. Bean's Vacation." I must admit, humor is not the easiest thing to write about. Likewise, "Mr. Bean's Vacation" is not a movie I can easily describe because there isn't much to describe.
There is no story in this movie. There are some connecting events, but outside the fact that Bean wins a trip to Paris and is attempting to get a lost boy to the Cannes Film Festival, there really isn't much in terms of story. Heck, there isn't even much in terms of dialog. Unlike the previous Bean film, "Bean: The Movie," Mr. Bean has returned to being his clumsy, mumbling self. No speeches, no conversing in American slang, just Bean messing up in every sticky situation he gets himself in. There are moments when the film stalls, but there are much more laughs to be found then groans. In fact, I'd venture to say there were at least three scenes that had me laughing so hard, my stomach actually began to hurt. You know the feeling right? You start laughing. Then you continue laughing. Then you can't stop laughing.
Then you grab your stomach in pain, trying to catch your breath, but you just can't stop laughing. Yeah, "Mr. Bean's Vacation" can be like that sometimes. In a rare leap of faith, most the dialog that DOES make it's way through the movie is in French, with subtitles! This makes sense since Bean is traveling with a French boy he can't communicate with, which is the source of many of the misunderstandings in this movie that results in gags. But it's also daring because the characters must come to understand each other through their body language instead of their speech, which makes the language in this movie universal. Indeed, the few times the subtitles do show up it won't matter, because even if the kids can't read the subtitles they can read the body language, and thus they still get the joke.
One thing I would keep an eye out for is a scene involving Bean eating sea food, which is most likely the single funniest scene I've seen at the movies all year so far. Now, I'm going to be honest, this is an easy movie to stomp on. The art of Chaplin and Keaton is no longer appreciated by most of today's audiences, who prefer character say the f word every other word in order to gain a laugh. People also like jokes with very perverse suggestions (sometimes very perverse dialog to go with it). The idea of getting people of all ages, of all ethnic's, of all religions to one screening of "Mr. Bean's Vacation" and having them all laugh must sound like a foreign idea. The idea of paying $10.00 to see a movie that essentially has no story must at the very least sound strange. But "Mr. Bean's Vacation" is a very unique film in these regards.
Yes, it has flaws. There are moments where the film just drags, and the skits aren't sown together as flawlessly as they could be, but these points are moot. The bottom line is "Mr. Bean's Vacation" is pure comedy. Not all of it works, but most of it does. It's something the whole family can see and not be offended by. In fact, it may even be smarter then most of the big star "comedies" that we've seen released this year. It's not perfect, but if you're looking for a comedy, and especially one that you can bring your kids to, "Mr. Bean's Vacation" is a winner.
Rating: *** and a half stars
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