Bee Movie

Review by Jason Donner

Jerry Seinfeld in an animated movie! Ye Gods, why has this idea not escaped from the collective Hollywood brain before today? It seems like a great idea… Jerry Seinfeld… Bees… cartoons! It’s gold! GOLD!

Actually, not gold… not even a silver. It’s bronze, maybe but it would have to be a tarnished bronze.

In Bee Movie, a little bee voiced by Jerry Seinfeld leaves the hive to discover the world and, in doing so, deals with human aggression towards bees and the fact that they’ve been stealing honey for generations… and it’s time to do something about it… in court even!

Yeah, even I have a hard time believing that an animated movie chooses to take place in a courtroom of all places.

To put it bluntly, Bee Movie is all the pop-culture references of Shrek without likeable characters or any of the funny. Where Shrek cut into you with a pop-culture scalpel (okay, kitchen knife), Bee Movie uses a chainsaw and not just any chainsaw, a big rusty one that drips noxious black grease into your open wounds.

That being said, I don’t hate this movie. It is actually a little better than I expected, but that being said I didn’t expect a lot. There’s no sly simple humor in Bee Movie, it’s all face value and in front of you… not to mention that there are a lot… an awful lot of annoying and unfunny bee puns.

Still, it does have a rather appealing wit to it, I'll give it that.

By the time the movie nears what appears to be the end, it becomes a very annoying message movie about the importance of bees to the world ecosystem. Thank you for that message, there bub… exactly what do you propose we do? I’ve never killed a bee before so should I continue not killing them? I need simple stuff like this explained to me, you see.

You might like it, but Bee Movie struck me as being too self-aware, too smarmy, and in a few short years, too dated. I would love to see animated movies return to being good instead of seeing how many pop culture references they can rattle off in 90 minutes.