Score: 78/100
Score on a par with: Crash 80/100; Millions 78/100; The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou 76/100; The Wicker Man 79/100; Finding Neverland 77/100; Telephone Box 78/100; The Bourne Identity 80/100; Minority Report 79/100; Spiderman 76/100; Iris 77/100; A Knight’s Tale 78/100; The Gift 79/100
A pleasant surprise, this: though slow to start it did build into a very funny and quite original piece – this did not feel like a stretched television episode, but had a plot (if you can call it that) and an aesthetic which justified its length and its cinema release. It is quite a pretty film, and it does look good on the big screen.
Further, the script is very nicely written and a lot of thought has gone into the film overall – the slapstick in the posh restaurant is nicely offset later in the film when the pompous waiter is seen bleakly eating a cheeseburger in a windswept park. More importantly, the film builds to a conclusion which is not only funny, but which successfully makes use of the rest of the film – the punchline actually works (surprisingly, and with a nice stunt).
It’s quite an unusual film in that none of the jokes, despite their childishness, are laboured and a lot of them are funny because of what the audience doesn’t see – we never see what tempts Bean into the shed, or how he swaps seats with the driver – and that’s lovely: this is no Johnny English, in which every joke was signposted from before the start of the film, there’s some imagination here. There are some fabulously absurd scenes, too: the approaching moped is positively Pythonesque, Bean miming to opera, Bean overtaking the Tour de France and the tank squashing the bicycle are all simply hilarious.
I never for a moment thought this film would be any good at all, and yet it was actually quite brilliant. Enormously enjoyable: go now.
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