The director tried to warn us of Mr. Bean's true nature right before Mr. Bean attempted to murder twelve people.
While this mid-90s romp doesn’t live up to its post-colonic title, it is still a disaster movie in its own right.
Bean is yet another entry into the pantheon of 90s films that star a character so utterly intolerable it is inconceivable no other human could ever stand them. However, Bean tacitly understands how intolerable Mr. Bean is. His co-workers not only send him to America to get rid of him for awhile (why don’t they just fire him?) yet they also hoodwink poor Peter McNicol’s character into believing that Mr. Bean is not merely delivering the painting, Whistler’s Mother, just purchased for an inordinate sum, but Mr. Bean is also a doctor, a genius, of artistic works. Correctly, people in America at a glance know Mr. Bean is fucking weird. So weird, in fact, that David’s (MacNicol) wife immediately takes his kids away to her mother’s after spending like 2 minutes of screentime with Mr. Bean – from a production standpoint, this was a narrative choice so they wouldn’t have to pay the family for 85% of the film.
You know what? David may be a totally insufferable cuck, one of cinema’s great cucks, but his wife is a total bitch and his kids are ungrateful little shits. It’s no small wonder why David hates himself. There is one scene where David, knowing his life is in the shits and his career is over, gets super wasted with Mr. Bean. When he gets home, his wife is in the kitchen (she’d been at her mother’s for like weeks at this point) and is all super pissed that she decided to come home with the kids, but he wasn’t there waiting for them (she naturally expected him to be lying in the fetal position, crying, helpless without her because he’s a tremendous cuck). She’s such a bitch she even made her two kids sit on the stairs, in the dark, for like 6 or more hours, waiting for David to come home so she could use them to attack him.
What a bitch.
Sadly, this movie was not all that funny. Mr. Bean’s shtick doesn’t survive the 90 minute runtime. If he had a solid supporting cast to work with, this movie could’ve been so much better. Like, David would have been ideally played by Billy Crystal (who is perfect at that smarmy guy that’s kind of a dick, yet loveable in the end, who is undermined by his family and in his career), but they couldn’t afford Billy Crystal, so they settled for Peter MacNicol (ouch). The studio told him, “We couldn’t afford Bill Crystal…or anyone else. So do your best Billy Crystal impression,” and he said, “No” and decided to have zero personality whatsoever. Awful choice, Peter. Awful choice.
It was during the airport scene when I had an epiphany. I realized that Mr. Bean is an entity of unadulterated evil, a fiendish, maleficent devil hellbent on causing pure, unbridled mischief – it was then that the film put me under its spell.
Mr. Bean terrorizing coma patients by hurlting their consciousness into an inescapable nightmare to boost his power.
Mr. Bean KNEW that paper bag was full of vomit, but he didn’t care. Because he’s evil. He knew the panic he would cause by making those cops in the airport think he was a mass shooter. The following interrogation was straight of The Usual Suspects, a clever jab because Mr. Bean makes Keyser Soze look like a limp-dick little bitch. You think faking a limp is difficult? Imagine fooling the entire world into thinking Mr. Bean just strange. Mr. Bean wasn’t just acting strange on the other side of that two way mirror because he thought it was a mirror – he was looking through the mirror and taunting the police because his true form is but a puff of a smoke in inky blackness.
Mr. Bean is actually a winged creature.
Mr. Bean, just strange? Someone who is “just strange” doesn’t purposely manipulate an interactive theatre ride into becoming a traumatic apocalypse for mankind just for a thrill – he does it because it’s sinister as fuck. Mr. Bean is having the time of his life as the people around him scream out in horror and in pain as they fly through the air like the cows in Twister. There’s even one guy who survived being hurled across the room and started getting up and Mr. Bean, without a true blue ounce of empathy in eyes (his true visage leaking out in the midst of his ecstasy), grabbed that dying man by the face and furiously shoved him back down to the ground; I’m pretty sure he fell down some stairs. That was when Mr. Bean had a monstrous orgasm.
Disgusting.
Do you think the theory that Mr. Bean is evil is silly? Beans are symbolic of immortality, power, and magic. And it is said the bean flowers’ strong smell is associated with ghosts and death, and that it is able to induce bad dreams, terrifying visions, lunacy, and can even cause accidents to happen.
See a pattern now?
Beans ARE the magical fruit, right? Except that limerick’s following line, “the more you eat, the more you toot” is actually a mistranslation from the original Pagan saying:
“Beans, beans, the magical fruit,
The more you eat the more Mister Bean consumes your fondest memories and leave nothing behind except boundless madness that will annihilate you and everyone you’ve ever loved.”
It doesn’t rhyme because it’s Pagan.
The director of this film, Mel Smith, knew the legend of Mr. Bean and cleverly used music to tell us the truth he doesn’t dare utter (or else be destroyed). See, they make it seem as if this evil deity learns to be human by the end through understanding he ruined David’s life for no reason at all so he strives to save the day. And he does save the day, numerous times. Except every save is merely fixing the suffering that resulted from Mr. Bean’s wanton acts of malicious destruction.
You don't need to drop the soap when Mr. Bean is around.
He imploded David’s marriage immediately upon arrival and the first chance he got he sternutated his demonic mucus right in Whistler’s Mother’s fat fucking face, putting David’s job in jeopardy. We’re supposed to believe he didn’t explode his own pen and blue'd his handkerchief to smear ink on the painting, that it was an accident – same with the paint thinner application – but he knew what he was doing. He planned it out, for years. Immortal beings have little else to do. Long story short, he sneaks into the museum to replace the ruined painting with a poster for the unveiling, and this really happy, loud, heroic music plays as if he did something noble, something kind and altruistic.
He didn’t.
He destroyed a 50 million dollar painting and a timeless work of art, replaced it with a worthless poster affixed to the frame with chewing gum (like no one will EVER realize it’s not a painting!), desecrated it with a poor depiction of his ostensible visage, and made sure David knew about it so that he would be complicit in his crimes of grand larceny, destruction of property, breaking and entering, lord knows what else.
Wait, I know what else. That poor, poor security guard at the museum…that poor mother fucker. See, Mr. Bean didn’t just give the security guard laxative to make him shit to replace the painting while he pooped. Mr. Bean dumped in an entire container of laxatives, enough to kill him.
There is nothing human in those eyes.
If making this poor guy literally shit out his intestines and heart wasn’t evil enough, Mr. Bean MOVES ALL THE KEYS AROUND SO HE CAN’T GET INTO THE WASHROOM. The poor guy eventually has to throw himself screaming through the door where he no doubt immediately shit himself on impact and gave himself a hematoma. We see this security guard in the following hospital scene in considerable agony and near death. He’s got a wife and three daughters and Mr. Bean only thinks it’s funnier that they will grow up without a father.
The sick bastard.
While that poor security guard's final, embarrassing hours are recorded, the tapes showing Mr. Bean will be distorted and scrambled to protect him like McConaughey in that movie Frailty.
So there is beautifully written scene where David says to his daughter (who is clearly a hooker) as she gets on a motorcycle to “get off that death machine”, and then like 5 minutes later she’s in a coma from a motorcycle accident…Bean knew what was going to happen to her because he made it happen, which is why he waves goodbye to her with a quiet menace.
So at the hospital, Mr. Bean finds himself mistaken for a doctor because some nurses just walk up to a strange man they’ve never seen (he’s just in his shitty brown jacket) and assumed he was an ER surgeon and put him in a gown, where he operates on the cop who dealt with him twice after the airport and the theatre ride incident. Mr. Bean callously eats M&M’s while this cop is dying from a bullet wound, (he was shot stopping a carjacking that Mr. Bean made happen with his evil powers) and he dipped the candy in the open wound for some seasoning. It was then he found the bullet instead so, naturally, he re-inserted the bullet and caused massive bleeding. Why? Only so he can pull the bullet out with his fingers to impress the other doctors, and THAT SAME MUSIC PLAYS because he saved the life of a man he just tried to MURDER. Why? Because Mr. Bean is a hero in his eyes and it's his movie - he commanded Mel Smith make this film by haunting his dreams for years.
How does he follow this up? He mounts David’s comatose daughter and went at her like he that hand drier earlier in the movie, and then he is congratulated for bringing her out of the coma, which was an unintended consequence to his dry humping her body before sadomasochistically using the defibrillator to electrocute his nipples for pure pleasure.
So all’s well that ends well.
Right?
Wrong.
David’s family still hates him and his job is no less in danger because someone in the near future will realize that isn’t the real painting, and you know where they’re going to go looking first? DAVID. And the authorities will never find Mr. Bean because Mr. Bean doesn’t exist. There is a cute scene to remind us that Mr. Bean is just a stranger in a strange land (a demon in the land of mere mortals) where he’s flipping off everyone in LA because he thinks it’s a polite greeting. Yet when he says goodbye to David’s family, he knows what it really means and he intends to use it.
The only heroic thing Mr. Bean did was flip off David's family. They deserved it. Sit and spin, bitches.
Mr. Bean returns to England with the knowledge David will be arrested soon, divorced, estranged from his kids, and locked up for 15 years in a Federal Pound-You-In-The-Ass-Prison as he sleeps snugly with his teddy bear, who is the real entity of true evil that commanded Mr. Bean to terrorize Los Angeles, with the defaced Whistler’s Mother hanging up on his wall, while that heroic, happy music plays as the demon known as Mr. Bean enters a 150 year slumber. How, you may ask, did he sneak that painting through customs? You don’t need to go through customs to fly to your interdimensional lair.
There are few films where the bad guy wins, and Bean is at the top of that list.