After an amazing bombardment of advertising Bee Movie finally comes to theaters, but not even Jerry Seinfeld (who is actually quite annoying in this movie) can save this one as it has more of an after-school special feel to it than the makings of a feature film.
The story is simple. Barry Benson (Seinfeld) is a bee that has just graduated and is about to begin his lifelong duty as a worker in the hive. The deal is you pick your job and that’s your job for life. The film does take into account that bees only live about 40-50 days, which means schooling is all of about 9 days.
For Barry, however, this one job for life deal isn’t his image of a good time. He is a bit of a free spirit and decides to stretch his wings. On his first trip out of the hive he meets a human, starts up some conversation and his life is change, but the real change doesn’t come until he finds out humans are “stealing” the honey from the bees and selling it for profit. Well, this prompts Barry to sue on behalf of all bees and your story pretty much falls flat on its face at that exact moment. As a viewer looking beyond the pretty images on screen, hoping for an ounce of story and you are given that and you just sort of go, “Really?”
There are a few clever jokes in here for the adults in the audience, such as two of the parent companies “Honeyburton” and “Honron”, but those jokes are tired and this movie has the feeling of worn out all over it. You chuckle because you remember laughing at a joke like that once, not because it is funny. The point is you have heard it before.
Chris Rock has a funny turn as a mosquito named Mooseblood and “Seinfeld” guest star Patrick Warburton (Pudy on “Seinfeld”) plays on over animated character named Ken that never hits the mark, and I mean he never gets a laugh. As a matter of fact, outside Rock the long list of guest voice talent really brings nothing to the table, and we are talking about names like Renee Zellweger, Matthew Broderick, John Goodman, Kathy Bates, Barry Levinson, Larry King, Ray Liotta, Sting and Oprah Winfrey as Judge Bumbleton even though she is playing a human so the “Bumbleton” part I guess is just an unrecognized irony by the characters in the film.
Truly, this film upset me. I am a rabid “Seinfeld” fan and think Jerry is hilarious. It shocks me that he is listed as one of the writers on this film, but I can only believe he wrote the jokes because I think even he could have come up with a better story than a bunch of bees suing humans because they are stealing honey. Seriously, was there some situation where the humans offended bees so egregiously that a film had to be made about it? This film makes it feel like that is the case.
It is now obvious that the big marketing push is all a hunt for opening weekend box-office. I can only assume Paramount saw this film and realized they had a clunker on their hands. Fortunately Seinfeld is a bankable name and is more often than not quite funny, Bee Movie is one of his “not” funny moments.
