Rowan Atkinson has outstanding physical attributes for screen comedy. Wrinkled as a shar pei, with googly eyeballs, a grimacing grin and a limber body comparable to a pipe-cleaner statue, he is a living punch line.

With the childish, catastrophe-prone Mr. Bean, he has created a comic type and cornered the market on it. In "Mr. Bean's Holiday," filmed in gorgeous French locales, our attention ought to be fixed on the beauty of the backgrounds, but we can't take our eyes off the tweedy little eccentric in the high-water pants.

When a church raffle sends Bean on a trip to the Riviera with a pocketful of euros and a video camera to record his adventures, mishaps multiply like falling dominoes. Bean makes a hash of haute cuisine as he dines under the haughty gaze of a formal maitre d' (veteran actor Jean Rochefort), pretending to eat a plate of raw oysters while slipping them into a nearby diner's designer handbag. He separates a young traveler (Max Baldry) from his dad (Karel Roden) at a train station and spends much of the film trying to reunite the boy with his father. The child proves to be rather intrepid, while Bean is a nonstop bumbler.

Bean, who is mostly mute, moves from one misadventure to the next in a cartoonish visual narrative as if each sequence were a separate panel. Now he's following a compass-directed route through a busy restaurant, now he's chasing a chicken, now he's busking for spare change with mimed Puccini (uproarious). Bean conceptualizes the world the way a slightly daffy child would, perplexed by the obvious but capable of insights that dumbfound adults.

Like a budding individualist 9-year-old, he can be naughty and heedless, but most of the people he torments have it coming. In this case his chief victim is an egocentric American moviemaker (Willem Dafoe) whose pretentious film screening at the Cannes Film Festival Bean turns into a shambles.

Appropriately for a holiday-themed story, this is a leisurely film, one of consistent smiles rather than breathless hilarity.

Because the events of the story chain together as a train of more or less equal units, rather than snowballing into ever-greater magnitude and momentum, there's no show-stopping finale. "Mr. Bean's Holiday" doesn't try for too much, but in the crass and noisy theme park that is children's entertainment, it's as refreshing as icewater on a summer day.

Colin Covert • 612-673-7186

Colin Covertrating: Pg, Brief Mild language. In English and Subtitled French, Russian and Spanish. • ccovert@startribune.com