Johnny English

Rowan Atkinson is one of the funniest men alive, with his British television shows Mr Bean, The Thin Blue Line and, best of all, the Blackadder series, all of them 10 times as funny as anything that has ever been on American TV. So why are his movies so disastrous? Maybe that’s too harsh for Johnny English, there are some jokes that work well. Maybe half of it was funny. But Bean was terrible, we couldn’t even finish it, nothing but a lame re-working of old ideas from the TV show. And yet I was stunned to discover that Bean is the #92 international box office hit of all time, with $186,000,000, just behind Shrek. It was the first movie ever to earn 100 million before its US release. Go figure. And consider that it only cost 22 million to make …