Dreamworks #15: Bee Movie

Bee Movie - 7.0/10

This one got a lot of publicity leading up to its release due to Jerry Seinfeld’s involvement, and I’ll admid that was a large part of why I went to go see it. I remember feeling a bit underwhelmed, but unlike Over the Hedge I at least remembered the basic outline of the plot this time. 

The opening act of this film seems a lot like Antz with bees. A thriving insect civilization, remarkable in its efficiency, one guy wants more out of life, he’s voiced by a famous Jewish comedian, yadda yadda yadda. As time goes on though, you start to realize that this is a lot more simplistic than Antz. Where that film tried to portray the gritty (er, sorry) reality of living underground, this one presents the inside of a hive like something out of a Dr. Seuss book. I’m not saying that’s a negative, just a notable difference. 

More and more though, I started to notice that this movie didn’t know how seriously it was supposed to be taking itself. You’ve got serious ideas like the exploitation of bee labor (without their knowledge, even) for human benefits, what happens to a society when there’s nothing for its people to do (something I thought was portrayed much better in Pixar’s Wall-E), and the interconnectedness of even the smallest of cogs in the grand mechanism we call life on Earth. That’s some pretty deep stuff when you say it like that.

On the other hand, you have Patrick Warburton being extremely brash and testoseroney (even for him), a bee with a crush on a human, and John Goodman in the most absurdly over-the-top courtroom performance I think I’ve ever seen. I couldn’t decide if I was watching clever social commentary or a Saturday morning cartoon. There were also some weird potshots at random celebrities like Sting and Ray Liotta (wtf?) of all people. And even weirder, they voiced their own cameos. I are confuse.

At the center of this you have one of the nicest interspecies friendships I’ve seen in a while that just narrowly missed being a horribly awkward and weird interspecies romance by having the bee’s crush be unrequited. Thank the gods for small favors. And hey, that's Renée Zellweger again. And Chris Rock, too. (He's a mosquito lawyer. Get it? It's okay if you don't; he points it out for you.) I guess the Dreamworks crew liked working with them before, or else they were running out of random celebrities who were willing to voice minor animated characters. 

I don't have much else to say about this one. The comedy wasn’t laugh-out-loud funny, but it was mildly amusing most of the time. I dunno. I really didn’t get the sense they knew what kind of movie they wanted to make. They had a really great idea, but they didn’t execute it very well.