Rowan Atkinson's Mr Bean is an acquired taste, but one that has been tasted and found good around the globe - despite plenty of snooty notices from critics.

His big-screen revival has the blundering adult-child (now middle-aged and thus slightly more spooky in essence) winning a holiday at the Cannes Festival in a raffle.

It will either have you collapsed in a fit of the giggles throughout or sitting stony-faced in the stalls pondering why you spent the ticket money.

Bean is even more of a grunting imbecile than ever. He finally arrives in Cannes, after some suitably hair-raising adventures, during the presentation of an appalling film from a pretentious director (Willem Dafoe) who has previously taken his life into his hands by making Bean an extra in one of his commercials. Naturally the Cannes entry is also torpedoed. All Mr Bean wants to do is paddle on the beach.

Emma de Caunes is the vague love interest (which seems unlikely since Bean, whatever else he is, seems virtually sexless). And Max Baldry plays a small boy, son of one of the jurors, with whom Bean gets hopelessly lost on the way to the festival.

Atkinson's Bean clearly takes his cue from both theatrical mime and the silent cinema, especially in this film, where he hardly speaks. The difference is that the physical comedy involved comes largely from a myriad of facial expressions which is in direct contrast to Chaplin, Keaton or Harold Lloyd.

To say the humour throughout is basic would be to put it extremely mildly. But then so was that of some of the silent clowns upon whom Bean is based. The film-makers say they are aware that comparisons might be made with Jacques Tati's classic Monsieur Hulot's Holiday. Not by me they won't.