‘Mr. Bean’s Holiday’ is festival of pratfalls

It’s always strange when Rowan Atkinson’s character Mr. Bean speaks words, because Bean is at his best as the modern equivalent of a silent-movie comedian.

Happily, he doesn’t utter too many words in “Mr. Bean’s Holiday,” Bean’s second big-screen starring vehicle. Instead, he speaks the universal language of stupidity.

This is handy, because Mr. Bean wins a vacation to Cannes, in the south of France. The movie tracks his journey there — not an easy task, given his tendency to lose his passport, fall off trains and be mistaken for a kidnapper.

Bean must reunite a Russian kid and his father (Karel Roden), a juror at the Cannes Film Festival. Meanwhile, Bean meets an actress (Emma de Caunes) when he stumbles into the yogurt commercial she’s shooting for a pompous American director (Willem Dafoe).

All of this is an excuse for a series of Bean routines. These are never much more complicated than an early set-piece, as Bean confronts a platter of shrimp and raw oysters in a fancy Paris restaurant.

At times, the movie simply stops to watch Atkinson as he tries on some silly physical shtick: goose-stepping into a portable garment rack while dressed in a Nazi uniform, for instance, or beaming while riding a bicycle down a highway.

And why not? Atkinson’s style hasn’t changed since the first “Bean” movie 10 years ago, and if anything, his beetle-browed, giant-schnozzed face has grown even more rubbery.

The character is smartly handled in this film (there’s no gooshy sentimentality, and Bean never gets too seriously romantic about anything), and kids should take to the movie in the same way they made the first one a worldwide hit.

For some reason, “Mr. Bean’s Holiday” left me a little blah — even though I admired some of the more elaborate sight gags. But the preview audience around me was laughing heartily at pretty much every pratfall in the film, so take what I say with a grain of salt, and a raw oyster.

Rowan Atkinson stars in “Mr. Bean’s Holiday.”