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Bean (1997)

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134 comments in total

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28 out of 36 people found the following comment useful :-
You won't be able to stop laughing, 8 August 2003
Author: Amy Adler from Toledo, Ohio

Mr. Bean (Rowan Atkinson) is a London museum guard who is about to be fired by middle management. The big boss, however, won't hear of it; instead, he sends Mr. Bean to America. Once there, Mr. Bean is to pose as an art critic and give a rousing speech about Whistler's mother for a California art museum. Well, the museum director picks Mr. Bean up at the airport and pandemonium is the name of the game after that. Mr. Bean upsets the director's household, creates havoc at a local amusement park, blows up dinner and more. On top of that, he rarely speaks so everyone is certain he is an idiot. Can this man transform himself into an art critic and will he be able to present a speech on the museum's big day?

This movie is just flat-out fun. Although he has very little dialogue, Mr. Bean's expressions and antics are priceless. The supporting cast does a reasonably good job but Mr. Bean towers over everybody. This movie should be required viewing for anyone in a depressed state of mind; it can lift the spirits of even the saddest beings on earth. Recommended for a fine family evening of giggles and leg-slapping.

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24 out of 30 people found the following comment useful :-
Highly Underrated Classic, 3 May 2003
Author: Darth_Homer

For those of you who loved watching Mr Bean, this movie doesn't fail to disappoint you. I saw this last night and laughed my head off, in fact, I think I was laughing more than when I was seeing Johnny English(also starring Atkinson).

For those who really love the TV series, a few of the gags have been redone, including the vomit bag joke, the turkey head and the fast ride (the latter is so damn funny).

So if you love Rowan Atkinson or love Mr Bean, go see this film!

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24 out of 32 people found the following comment useful :-
British farce at its finest!, 8 November 2004
Author: Scott Peterson (sadisticcynic@hotmail.com) from Tennessee, U.S

This is one of the funniest movies I've ever seen, and in my opinion it is among the ranks of the legendary Monty Python.

"Bean" is about the infamous Mr.Bean, a lazy buffoon who manages to cause problems in even the simplest of tasks. In this movie, he works at an Art Gallery and the management desperately want to get rid of him. Rather than fire him, they send him to Los Angeles to unveil the painting, "Whistler's Mother". An American named David Langley allows Mr.Bean to stay in his house during his visit against the will of his family. This turns out to be a huge mistake.

This movie is roll-out-of-your-chair-laughing funny. Rowan Atkinson's acting is beyond excellent, and all of the other characters are good as well.

The only thing I can find to nitpick about this movie is that there is not a very strong plot. The movie is basically a line of connected humor skits. I personally do not mind this too much, but if you are looking for a movie with a story that can be made into a book, look elsewhere.

If you enjoyed the Mr.Bean series and like "disaster" movies, this is the perfect movie for you!

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17 out of 23 people found the following comment useful :-
Truly a underrated movie!, 25 April 2001

Author: Dan Mudd from USA

Bean: The Movie is without a shadow of a doubt, one best comedies of 1997. Bean (Rowan Atkinson) is working as a guard in the Royal Gallery of London. His employers, except for one, all hate him. They send him on a two-month sabbatical (to get rid of him for awhile) to present Whistler's Mother to the Grierson Art Gallery in Los Angeles. The only problem? They told the Grierson that he was a world-famous scholar! If you think Bean couldn't get into any more trouble than he does in the UK, wait till you see what he does in the movie!

Bean stays with the Langley family, all of whom I found annoying except for David (Peter MacNicol), Bean's new friend. Burt Reynolds even has a short cameo appearance as General Newton, a person who cares nothing for art personally.

Although he used some of his former gags, there is enough new ones that make the movie stand out. The movie did better overseas than in the U.S. due to moronic critics and bad advertising.

Bottom line, Bean: The Movie never got the credit it deserved over here. I would buy this movie on DVD or VHS, whichever you prefer. Also if you're a Bean fan, look for The Best Bits of Mr. Bean. It's a collection of Mr. Bean skits from his TV show!

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16 out of 23 people found the following comment useful :-
God, I LOVED this movie!!!!!!!!!!!!, 16 November 2000
Author: Matt Barry from Baltimore, Maryland

How can anyone not LOVE this movie. It has to be the greatest comedy made in the 1990s. IT HAS TO BE. Rowan Atkinson is an incredible slapstick comedian. He is one of the great comedy performers of all time, ranking alongside Chaplin, Keaton, Fields, The Marxes, Tati, Brooks and Allen. This was a really popular movie when it was released in the Spring of 1997-and with good reason. If there could ONLY be more movies like this. I'm a big fan of Atkinson's TV shows MR BEAN, BLACKADDER and of course THE THIN BLUE LINE. Do yourself a favor and see this movie!

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12 out of 17 people found the following comment useful :-
Successful transformation to the big screen, 2 March 2001

Author: davidjmccrea from london

Warning:Plot Giveaways

Bean the movie is a triumph in the cinema world. For once a film based on the T.V. series has worked. It may be the case the best jokes are altered versions of what appeared on the small screen but are slotted into the story line with immense skill. Just before Bean gets the Turkey stuck on his head when asked had he cooked a turkey before he nods his head in an unsure "mmmm" mannner.

The best thing about Bean the movie is the for once it is the Americans who are made to look stupid. Whereas in many movies the British are the joke being portrayed as posh in Bean it the Americans who are laughed at for being simply to stupid to realise this so called doctor bean is in fact not a doctor.

On hearing Mr Bean was hitting the big screen I was at first very concerned that it would not work for him to talk . However many of the funniest lines are when he does open his mouth such as when he calls a 50 million dollar painting a big picture of an old bat.

Very recommended

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11 out of 16 people found the following comment useful :-
Some funny moments, but generally fails to capture the magic, charm or humour of the series, 5 November 2006

Author: davideo-2 from Birmingham,England

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. **

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6 out of 7 people found the following comment useful :-
Mr. Bean has a very distinctive and narrow brand of slapstick comedy so his target audience is not that huge, but people who are into his humor should LOVE this movie., 30 January 2003

Author: Michael DeZubiria (miked32@hotmail.com) from Luoyang, China

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

I had never seen any of Rowan Atkinson's performances as Mr. Bean when this movie came out in 1997, so I knew nothing about it when I went to see it other than that it was about the zany adventures of this strange looking man on the movie poster. He strikes me as one of those comedians that you either completely love or completely hate, because his comedy is so extreme. It's not the kind of thing that you can watch and just sort of like or not really care for. It's one of those movies where it's not surprising to see people walk out in the middle while other people are just about falling out of their chairs laughing so hard. Personally, I was one of the latter.

I admit that Bean certainly deals in a very childish sort of humor. This is, by definition, slapstick comedy, and it is certainly not for all tastes. But from the movie's opening scene, which shows Bean gleefully shaving his entire face with an electric razor (including his forehead and even his tongue), you know that this is what the movie is like, so you can't really hold that against it.

The story in the film is clearly one of those that is invented for the movie and then manipulated to fit the screenplay and to work nicely into the movie. It's not that hard to realize that such a huge art gallery could be fooled for so long by someone like Mr. Bean, thinking that he's a genius, and certainly no way that he would be left alone with a $50 million painting long enough to remove it from the vault and rub paint thinner into it, but on the other hand, the rest of the comedy fits so nicely into this plot. At the very least, there are relatively realistic situations thrown into an unrealistic plot, which makes the movie enjoyable even though you don't really take it seriously.

There is a wonderful scene, for example, where Bean sneezes on the painting of Whistler's Mother, and then he tries to wipe off the spray with his handkerchief, which has been smeared with a leaky pen. So the painting gets smeared with ink, and he grabs the first can he sees off a nearby shelf, which happens to be paint thinner. It cleans the ink off nicely but then causes the paint to boil off, and then Bean frantically tries to save it by wiping it even harder, rubbing the paint off right down to the canvas. Sure, this is not the mark of an intelligent mind, but that's the point of the whole movie.

Bean is a film that relies on the fact that humans are so amused by the misfortunes of others. There's something funny about seeing someone else get into a sticky situation, and in movies like this, they do just that and things only get worse and worse. Granted, there are a million ways out of every situation that Bean gets into that would be less painful than the routes that he chooses, but if he took them there would be no movie. Consider, for example, the bathroom scene where a man walks in on Bean as he appears to be getting a little too friendly with a hot air dryer. He quickly grabs a light bulb pretending that he had been examining it, and then the man leaves and Bean drops the hot bulb to break on the ground and when he goes to run cold water over his burnt fingers the water sprays his crotch again. Total slapstick, but that's funny!

Like I said, Bean is not a movie for all tastes. But there is a place for childish humor in movies, and that place is in movies like this. It certainly can be taken too far or simply done wrong, as in the case of movies like the American Pies or the Scary Movies, etc., but Bean is a movie that knows what kind of comedy it delivers, and it knows how far to go before things just descend into vulgarity and bad taste. It's a comedy that does not pretend to be anything that it's not, and for that it should be respected. It is also, by the way, the kind of a comedy that allows for an almost innumerable amount of sequels. While I can certainly see it being vastly overdone, I would just like to say that if a couple more Bean movies were to be made, I would be among the last to complain!

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6 out of 9 people found the following comment useful :-
Great movie, 3 July 1999
Author: chris-474

Although the storyline is quite different to the usual ones in the tv show, the movie still captures the clumsiness and total annoyingness of the character of Mr Bean. Rowan Atkinson is great and so are the other actors in the film. I really enjoyed this, probably more because it wasn't a disaster like the tv show usually is. In other words Bean didn't stuff up as much. there were some great scenes involving the painting and in the hospital. I recommend it to those comedy fans and for anybody who can withstand the lunatic behaviour of Mr Bean.

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5 out of 8 people found the following comment useful :-
It May Not Be As Good As The TV Series But It's Still Hilarious As Hell, With A Great Story And An Incredible Performance From Rowan Atkinson!, 24 October 2005

Author: (callanvass@hotmail.com) from victoria b.c canada

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

It may not be as good as the TV series but it's still hilarious as hell, with an incredible performance from Rowan Atkinson!. All the characters are fantastic, and the story is really cool!, plus Rowan Atkinson is simply incredible in this!. I did have a couple problems with this though, 1.Other then Peter MacNicol(David) there was not 1 likable family member in this film, they were all selfish and inconsiderate. 2Mr. Bean talked to much in this film, i liked it better when he was silent. Some of the funniest moments in the film for me is when Mr. Bean has trouble with the taps in the washroom , and another one is Mr Bean blows his nose in a hilarious way!, and even though they threw in some old gags, there were still funny as hell!. Atkisnon and Peter MacNicol, had fantastic chemistry together!,and Mr. Bean's speech was really cool!, plus the ending was really cute. I also loved it when Mr. Bean starts giving middle fingers to everyone who is driving or walking by!,and i feel this should be a lot higher then 5.4!, plus it had a cool emotional scene as well!. This may not be as good as the TV series, but it's still hilarious, as hell, with a great story and an incredible performance from Rowan Atkinson!, and i say go see it now!. The Direction is fantastic!.Mel Smith does a fantastic job here, with awesome camera work, cool angles and keeping the film hilarious and at very fast pace!.The Acting is wonderful!. Rowan Atkinson is amazing as always, and is incredible here, he is incredibly hilarious, extremely likable, had fantastic chemistry with Peter MacNicol, as always did some crazy/hilarious gags, seemed to be having a lot of fun, and just did an incredible job!. (Rowan Rules!!!!!). Peter MacNicol is wonderful here, he is extremely hilarious, had fantastic chemistry with Rowan Atkinson, had some classic and hilarious lines, was extremely likable, and is one talented man! (MacNicol Rules!). Pamela Reed is beautiful and did fine with what she had to do, and is a great actress, but her character was unlikable for me, she still rocks though. Harris Yulin is surprisingly good here in his role i'm not a big fan but he surprised me here. Burt Reynolds is hilarious in his small role as The General he rocked!. Andrew Lawrence and Tricia Vessey are annoying as Kevin and Jennifer, especially Jennifer, she played one of the most grating characters ever!, she was so snobbish!.Larry Drake(Elmer),Chris Ellis(Det. Butler),Sandra Oh(Bernice Schimmel),Richard Gant(Lt. Brutus) all do great with what they have to do. Rest of the cast are fine. Overall go see it now!. ***** out of 5

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