After picking myself up off the floor in side-splitting hysterics for the third time, I considered the notion that with Bean I might be seeing the best comedy of the year.

Then I looked around the theater and saw 10-year-olds picking themselves up off the floor in hysterics similar to mine. So I quickly assessed whether my laughter was coming from my suppressed need for blatant, juvenile humor or if the movie really was as good as the television show Mr. Bean on which it is based.

One thing for sure is that the plot does not offer much in dry and mature humor that the show utilizes so brilliantly. The Royal Museum of London wants to fire Mr. Bean (Rowan Atkinson), who seems to spend most of his time as a security guard asleep. For some reason, though, the big-shot of the museum has an unusual liking for Mr. Bean and will not allow it.

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So the museum board finds another way to get rid of Mr. Bean. The board needs an art expert to represent it at a flashy museum in Los Angeles to whom the famous painting Whistler’s Mother has just been sold. So they send Mr. Bean, thus creating an entirely contrived plot more likely to be found in those ghastly Nickelodeon movies.

But Atkinson’s English humor is far too good to let a dismal plot ruin his movie. Or is it?

What makes the television show so great is how Mr. Bean deals with everyday situations while living in his own little world, oblivious to anything outside of it. In Bean he seems more like a superfool who gets himself into the worst possible situations through such trivial commonplaces like washing his hands or sneezing.

Atkinson really is hilarious and seeing Bean will make you laugh. Some of his facial expressions are enough to cause slight loss of bodily function control. But the speech Mr. Bean gives about Whistler’s Mother really affirms that Atkinson’s best humor is his dry humor. And Bean is missing too much of it to be really great like it should have been.