r. Bean's Holiday, the latest entry for British comedian Rowan Atkinson's nearly silent Bean, is an outing that is intended to milk the last laughs from this slapstick cow. Atkinson's obnoxious, gibbering alter ego, who began life as a polymorphous man-child on British TV, gives his last appearance in a storyline that directly recalls another silent comedy-like creation - M. Hulot's Holiday.

This Holiday has Bean winning a raffle whose grand prize is a trip to Cannes - complete with a digital video camera – so our bumbling cretin is off to France, recording his journey every step of the way. But in pure Bean fashion, his absurdist mishaps accumulate in epic proportions; he misses his train, loses his luggage, passport and money, he spills oysters into a woman's purse, and his clumsy video footage ends up as part of a festival acclaimed movie.

In Paris he misses his train south and he inadvertently separates a young Russian traveler (newcomer Max Baldry) from his father (Karel Roden) and spends much of the film trying to make it to the Cannes Film Festival, where the boy's father is a member of the jury.

Misadventure follows misadventure as Bean makes his selfishly childish choices - rather than rational ones - in order not to interrupt his daily flow. This simpleton hero falls afoul of a film set where a self-indulgent filmmaker (Willem Dafoe, pretty good) and his ingénue (Emma de Caunes of The Science of Sleep) are recreating World War II in France - for a yogurt commercial!