Why do they do it? The original Mr Bean sketches on British TV were charming, slight and yes, very funny. He was a triumph of visual humour - real old-fashioned slapstick done with imagination, a genuine clown, silent and sometimes even touching. Then they go and raise this huge unwieldy edifice of a movie on top of this sweet, fragile creation - and hardly surprisingly, it's flattened. There's nothing funny about this movie; the bits that work are second-hand borrowings from "Being There" and frankly, there aren't many of those. One set-piece in an operating theatre is tasteless in the extreme and don't let your pre-schoolers see Rowan Atkinson drinking hot water from the kettle if you want to stay out of the hospital yourself...
