Mr. Bean (Rowan Atkinson) is a character almost completely ignorant of the havoc he causes. Essentially, he's so caught up in his own concerns that he's oblivious to almost everything going on around him. Sadly, in this day and age, it's almost as if people go to admire Mr. Bean as much as they go to laugh at him.

While I watched this film, these are the things that happened around me: A crying infant screamed at the top of his lungs, a teenager ran up and down the stairs talking on his cell phone, a twenty-something opened her cell phone no less than a dozen times, her screen glaring like a beacon in the darkened theater, and a middle-aged couple behind me casually chatted about the plot of the movie as though they were speaking to each other across an airport runway.

These folks carelessly laughed when Mr. Bean accidentally separates a father (Karel Roden) from his son, Stepan (Max Baldry), because Mr. Bean insists the father film him getting on a train to Cannes causing the father to miss the train. They laughed more as Mr. Bean spills his latte on a sleeping man's laptop computer and then pours the contents back into the cup. They laughed during all the uncomfortable situations along the way as Mr. Bean tries to reunite the boy with his father. Such irony could only be exceeded if Britney Spears married Michael Jackson and they were given the Parental Couple of the Year Award.

Mr. Bean is that ignorant, but seemingly well-meaning dope in us all. I mean, in you all. The filmmakers want us to believe he's harmless, but is he really? That harmlessness is embodied by the fact that Bean's relationship with the boy is never characterized in any negative way. Another film would paint him as a deviant of some kind, but the filmmakers know that to characterize Mr. Bean this way would be to sully the nature of his persona. Mr. Bean just never intends to cause anyone any harm. He's klutzy, dim-witted, but never ever malicious.

An appropriate catch phrase for Mr. Bean would be "ignorance is bliss." Yet this is precisely what drives me up the wall about Mr. Bean's implication for the larger world. He's a symbol of everything that's gone wrong in civil society. Boneheads like Mr. Bean can claim ignorance and get away with anything. A crying baby's mother claims "oh, I didn't think anybody would mind." A talking couple claims "oh, I didn't realize you could hear us." A text messenger claims "oh, I didn't think I was bothering anybody."

Well, you are bothering somebody. You are bothering me. You people are annoying and Mr. Bean, you seem to make them laugh and give value to their ignorance. I hate you Mr. Bean.