CriticSociety- film reviews

Review

Bee Movie

Director

Stephen Hickner

Simon J Smith

Year

2007

Rating

Reviewed by

Gon Curiel a.k.a. Groucho

Review date

Thursday, December 13, 2007

I’m Jerry Seinfeld’s #1 fan. I love his stand-up comedy, adore his TV show, and quickly fell for Bee Movie, his first big-screen project. I’ve heard some critics weren’t exactly enthusiastic about it, calling it flat, dull or irrelevant, but this is Seinfeld’s humor, it’s a collection of observations and jokes on everyday life, but in a funny way. There’s very little drama, but lots of humor, and I can tell you I never stopped laughing. So far, it’s one of my favorite films this year.

There’s neither melodrama nor lulls. The story moves quickly, as do some action sequences of bees flying at top speed. There’s some familiar territory at first: Barry B. Benson (Jerry Seinfeld) is a bee who’s not sure he wants to follow the rules of the beehive and choose a profession in the honey-making industry that will last him till his death. You sense déjà vu when all this happens, but then things go the funny way: in an exploration of the outside world, Barry finds love in a human being, Vanessa (Renée Zellweger), and gets furious about the humans’ exploitation of bee-made honey, about which he decides to do something.

But all this is done in the least dramatic way possible. There’s very little sentiment, but a lot of puns. For instance, it turns out that bees can speak in a perfectly understandable way, but choose not to do so with humans. However, after Vanessa saves his life, Barry can’t help but thank her. This ensues a hilariously cordial conversation. And from then on, bees speak to humans. Believable? ‘Course not. Funny? For sure! And it’s quite simple.

Bee Movie is a pleasant film because you keep having a good time all through it. At every turn there’s something funny, and every excuse to make a joke, even if a cheap one, is made the best of. There’s a particular character, Mooseblood the Mosquito (Chris Rock), that seems to have been created just for a punch line at the end. That’s the spirit of the script co-written by Jerry: let’s make fun of everything possible.

Besides Seinfeld, Zellweger, and Rock, who do a fantastic job, voices are lent by Matthew Broderick, Patrick Warburton, John Goodman, Kathy Bates, Barry Levinson, Oprah Winfrey and many more, some of them in effective cameos. The computer-animated work is conventional Dreamworks, which is great, and there’s a lot of clever production design at every place. The music score by Rupert Gregson-Williams is as light and effective as the script. Oh, and what a great use of The Archies’ “Sugar Sugar” and The Beatles’ “Here comes the sun” (the latter sung by Sheryl Crow).

When all is said and done, walking out of Bee Movie you’re the exact same person, but probably that’s the point: if not a life-changing experience, it’s a fine piece of entertainment, a perfect way to spend an hour and a half. This film was conceived as a play on the term “B Movie”, and after all, it offers the type of entertainment that the best such movies did, in an unpretentious, but very effective, way.

“It’s not a tone – I’m panicky!”

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