Latest Mr. Bean adventure, ‘Holiday,’ may mean well, but …

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In theaters

MR. BEAN’S HOLIDAY, directed by Steve Bendelack, written by Hamish McColl and Robin Driscoll, 90 minutes, rated G.

The new Steve Bendelack movie, “Mr. Bean’s Holiday,” is busy pleasing audiences and doing hopping business abroad, which might be the place to see it if you want to enjoy it.

This underwhelming movie has made nearly $200 million overseas, a huge sum by anyone’s standards, all without the help of what usually propels our own blockbusters to the top of the box-office heap: explosions and guns, A-list actors having A-list sex, raunchy comedies that press against the boundaries of good taste.

While those elements hardly have a place in a G-rated family movie such as “Holiday,” given the film’s disappointing lack of a narrative drive, a little spirited action could have gone a long way in helping to pick up its sluggish pace.

Rowan Atkinson returns as Bean, who this time out is caught in a series of foibles that spring from his winning a video camera and a trip to Cannes, France, at a church auction. Naturally, it’s a setup for disaster, with the clueless Bean bumbling out of England as he travels by train to his foreign destination.

Along the way, he manages to separate a young boy (Max Baldry) from his father, a filmmaker also traveling to Cannes for the film festival being held there. “Holiday” designs to reunite father and son, with the young actress Sabine (Emma de Caunes) and the director Carson Clay (Willem Dafoe) joining the forced tomfoolery.

It’s the mashing together of these relationships and the plot threads they generate that allow the film its formidable payoff. The ending is the best, most ingenious part of the show – it’s very clever – though it comes too late to save it.

As appealing as Atkinson is as Bean, he always has been best served in small doses. Many have compared him to Charlie Chaplin in Chaplin’s silent films, though he seldom has been as inventive or as touching.

Unlike Chaplin, you don’t connect with Bean on a human level, which was key to Chaplin’s appeal. Instead, Bean is more of a curiosity whose gimmick is an exaggerated pantomime of Chaplin or, for that matter, Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot, whom Atkinson has cited as his chief inspiration for Bean. That proves especially true here, since “Mr. Bean’s Holiday” is essentially a riff on 1953’s “Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday.”

What we’re left with in “Holiday” is a movie that is good-naturedly banal. Some scenes are funny, such as when Bean lip-syncs to an opera or when he attempts to eat shellfish at a French bistro. Trouble is, there aren’t enough of those scenes to recommend the movie. Bean screws up his face on cue, which likely will appeal to fans or to the very young. But for those who appreciate the power of Bean in brevity, this Bean leads to too much bad gas.

Grade: C-

On DVD

GEORGIA RULE, directed by Garry Marshall, written by Mark Andrus, 113 minutes, rated R.

Garry Marshall’s “Georgia Rule” stars everyone’s favorite enfant terrible and bonne vivante Lindsay Lohan as Rachel, a misguided train wreck of a 17-year-old brat who sports the sort of foul mouth that crosses the line so often, some might want to wash it out with soap.

In fact, in a pivotal scene, that actually happens, with Jane Fonda’s Georgia literally applying the soap and scrubbing.

Not that it does much good, mind you. You could dip this film and its characters in bleach and still you’d come away with a story that makes you itch.

Based on Mark Andrus’ screenplay, “Georgia Rule” begins on a shrill note and sustains it, with Rachel and her alcoholic mother, Lilly (Felicity Huffman), going at each other’s throats in the road trip from hell.

Determined to straighten her daughter out, selfish, unlikable Lilly has yanked selfish, unlikable Rachel out of San Francisco and shuffled her off to Idaho, where Lilly’s mother lives a cleaner life marked by the sort of strident rules that drove Lilly away years ago. With Rachel also railing against those rules, the stage is set for loads of soapy confrontations between granddaughter and grandmother, which makes for an exhausting movie that plunges into an almost limitless well of bad taste, a good deal of which is masked as humor.

Witness, for example, Rachel’s behavior in town: She’s a blast of cold air cloaked in hot steam. She dresses like a tart, behaves like a tart, and essentially is a tart, going so far as to treat the local Mormon boy, Harlan (Garrett Hedlund), a virgin, to oral sex, while later chasing down the local Mormon girls and promising she’ll sleep with their boyfriends if they don’t get off her back. To top things off, she puts the moves on her new employer, the smoldering local veterinarian (Dermot Mulroney), who happens to be her mother’s former boyfriend.

So, yes, Rachel is a charmer, as is the movie, which obviously has issues with the Mormon faith that linger on the screen like a stain.

Meanwhile, the film tries to explain away Rachel’s bad behavior by tossing in a heated subplot that involves child molestation, which ignites in Georgia a rage so deep, she comes out swinging with a baseball bat in ways that suggest all those Jane Fonda workouts from the ’80s weren’t for nothing. This woman does some damage.

So does the movie. What’s so disappointing about “Georgia Rule” isn’t just that Universal sold out audiences with a misleading advertising campaign that suggested a far lighter movie, but that everyone here is better than the material. Fonda and Huffman have a go of it, sometimes rising to the occasion, but as for Lohan? She’s a lost soul.

Grade: D+

Visit www.weekinrewind.com, the archive of Bangor Daily News film critic Christopher Smith’s reviews, which appear Mondays, Fridays and weekends in Lifestyle, as well as on bangordailynews.com. He may be reached at Christopher@weekinrewind.com.

The Video-DVD Corner

Renting a video or a DVD? BDN film critic Christopher Smith can help. Below are his grades of recent releases in video stores. Those in bold print are new to video stores this week.

Akeelah and the Bee – B+

Babel – A-

Because I Said So – C

Borat – B+

Bridge to Terabithia – B+

Casino Royale – A

Charlotte’s Web – B+

Children of Men – A

Dead Silence – F

Deja Vu – C+

The Departed – A

Desperate Housewives: Season Three – B+

The Devil Wears Prada – B+

Disturbia – B

Dr. T and the Women: Special Edition – D

Dreamgirls – B

Eragon – C

Fail Safe – A-

Flushed Away – B+

Fracture – C

Georgia Rule – D+

Ghost Rider – C-

The Good German – C

The Good Shepherd – B-

Half Nelson – A-

Hannibal Rising – C

The Hills Have Eyes II – D

The History Boys – B+

The Holiday – C+

Hollywoodland – C

The Illusionist – B+

Infamous – B+

Invincible – B

Kinky Boots – B+

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang – B+

The Last King of Scotland – B+

Letters from Iwo Jima – B+

Little Children – A-

Little Miss Sunshine – B+

The Marine – C+

Monster House – B+

Music and Lyrics – B

My Super Ex-Girlfriend – A-

Nip/Tuck: Complete Fourth Season – B+

Notes on a Scandal – B+

The Number 23 – D

Pan’s Labyrinth – A

The Prestige – B+

Primeval – D

The Queen – A-

Rocky Balboa – B+

A Scanner Darkly – B+

Shooter – C+

TMNT – C

30 Rock: Season 1 – B+

300 – C-

Unaccompanied Minors – C

Vacancy – C+

Venus – B+

Zodiac – C