"Bee Movie"Starring Jerry Seinfeld, Renee Zellwegger, Matthew Broderick, Ray
Liotta. Suicide pacts. Larry King. Beeswax-infused lip balm. Saddam
Hussein. There's virtually no topic too good for comic skewering in
"Bee Movie" and thank goodness for that.
Yes, much like a good
"Seinfeld" episode, "Bee Movie" ambles along at an easygoing clip,
dabbling in this situation and that and taking potshots at everything.
All the talking (and there's a lot of talking) makes "Bee Movie" a
pretty amusing adventure.
Seinfeld stars as Barry B. Benson, a
wisecracking honeybee who's just graduated college and doesn't want to
become yet another worker drone. So he sneaks outside the hive and
meets Vanessa (Zellwegger), a New York florist who takes a shine to the
talking insect.
But when Barry discovers that humans are profiting from
all the bees' work, he decides to "hit them where it hurts" he sues the
human race.This loose retelling doesn't begin to encompass all that
happens in "Bee Movie."
The movie is part coming-of-age story, part
romantic comedy, part road trip film and part courtroom drama. As I
said, the movie dabbles in a little of everything, so there's not
really a cohesive plot.And yet that's hardly a bad thing. Sure, "Bee
Movie" is episodic, at times a little choppy, but the jokes are snappy
and the characters memorable. In the film's best scene, the world's
most beloved honeybear meets the wrong end of a tranquilizer dart; in
another, the toppling of a giant honey bear container functions as
pointed political commentary.
The cameos, too, make "Bee Movie" a
winner. Chris Rock all but steals the show as Mooseblood, a wry
mosquito who observes that mosquito girls "always trade up" for, say,
dragonflies.
Liotta needles his penchant for "seething inner turmoil"
to hilarious effect, and Larry King pokes fun at his image.Some
critics, no doubt, will say that an animated movie that's all talk and
little action is a bore and a failure. Wrong. It all depends who's
doing the talking.
Grade: B+