The expensive, sparkling and dull cartoon Bee Movie was screened for critics after the WW press deadline. So we’re reviewing it now:
It would have been impossible for Jerry Seinfeld or anyone else involved in the making of Bee Movie to know that, while they were assembling a cartoon about bees who refuse to produce any more honey for their human overlords, 35 percent of the species Apis mellifera would go missing, presumed dead. So you can’t justly accuse Seinfeld of having been insensitive to the honeybee loss, though a moment of silence before the movie—or maybe a respectful buzzing of “Taps”—might have been a nice gesture. But then Bee Movie is pretty evidently not the product of people who have asked a lot of hard questions about their material. No one seems to have considered whether children—presumably the target audience for jaunty animation—would be entertained by a courtroom drama, or by jokes about TiVo, or by cameos from Sting and Ray Liotta, or by an unconsummated love story between a bee (Seinfeld) and a human woman (Renee Zellweger). Come to think of it, what exactly would a consummated love story have looked like? I mean, the bee can vibrate, but…
Dear Lord, I don’t want to think about this. But it’s the sort of question that crosses my mind when sitting through a film about a bee in love with a woman, and especially when that film contains as few laughs as Bee Movie contains. That the plot would be fairly rambling is not a surprise—though, my, is this thing sprawling. To recap: Barry B. Benson (or Barry Benson Bee; the movie is never quite clear on this point) is dissatisfied with the hive mentality of his, er, hive, and so goes outside the military-industrial comb-plex to find love and discover that people have been exploiting insect labor without contractual permission. So then there’s that lawsuit and, believe it or not, we’re only halfway through the story. But what does plot matter—it’s just a clothesline for the Jerry Seinfeld observational humor, which is…remarkably unfunny, actually. The jokes are flat, self-satisfied and hopelessly dated: It’s not a good sign when the hippest gag is a reference to The Graduate.
It’s easy to see what attracted Seinfeld to this project: He was clearly given free rein to indulge whatever ideas struck his fancy, and the actual animation strives for the detail and grace of Pixar, occasionally coming close to attaining it. His participation in Bee Movie is evidence that celebrities, like insects, are attracted to bright, shiny things—with equally messy results.
Bee Movie is rated PG. It opens today at Cedar Hills, Eastport, Cinema 99, Cinetopia, City Center, Cornelius, Division, Lake Twin, Moreland, Movies on TV, Oak Grove, Pioneer Place, Roseway, Sandy, Sherwood, St. Johns Twin Cinema-Pub, Tigard, Vancouver Plaza and Wilsonville.
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