Bean There

It's been a while now since anyone has tried to bring a British television comedy to the big screen - not surprisingly, since the resulting films have been so unremittingly awful over the years. It's clear that Rowan Atkinson, director Mel Smith and screenwriter Richard Curtis have taken note of those problems and tried to avoid them in this feature film version of Atkinson's hugely popular television character, Mr Bean. But their movie, while not as bad as some of those predecessors, still makes for glum viewing.

The plot is hardly worth mentioning, except that it functions as a tortuous device to transport the character from his usual English habitat to the more moviegenic Los Angeles. Bean (the Mr has been dropped) is a bungling employee of the "Royal National Gallery of England" whose bosses, in desperation, send him to Los Angeles to supervise the transfer of a famous painting ("Whistler's Mother", as it happens) to a California gallery. Arriving in LA, the hapless Bean immediately wreaks havoc in the life of his hosts, art specialist Peter MacNicol and his family, and ultimately causes a series of escalating disasters at the museum.

The best parts of all this are the scenes closest to the spirit of the original television series - the pure, solo slapstick routines where Atkinson can display his considerable talent for physical comedy. But the film-makers have clearly decided that silent slapstick isn't enough to fill an entire feature film, choosing to pad things out with a rather pathetic sub-plot about MacNicol's marital problems. Worse, they have invested Bean with some hitherto unsuspected positive qualities - by the end of the movie he appears to be capable of friendship and self-sacrifice. Worst of all, it appears that kids think he's cute, which goes completely against the grain of Atkinson's original, horrid, self-centred creation. In an attempt, presumably, to crack the American market, Atkinson, Smith and Curtis have drained most of the nastiness from the character, which may well work commercially, but leads to a disappointingly bland and forgettable little film.