Movie Review - The Bee Movie

OK, another one that I'm woefully late on seeing.  "Bee Movie" is another of the movies we got out out of the bargain bin.  Irish Woman spied it when she was picking up a few things for dinner, and thought that since it was a cartoon from Dreamworks, and we like other things they've put out, we might like this one.She and Boo did indeed seem to enjoy it.  Girlie Bear and I, well, not so much.  


To be honest, the label of "Gilded Turd" is too good for this waste of good celluloid.


The following paragraph condenses the plot of the movie, so if you're into hurting yourself and those around you, don't read it so you'll be surprised when you watch the movie.  The rest of you should use this as an excuse to never see this insult to the intelligence of starfish.

The movie centers around a bee, voiced by Jerry Seinfeld, named Barry.  Barry is a young bee on the go, who doesn't want to settle into his role as a drone.  He gets out of the hive, discovers that humans harvest honey for food, sues the human race to make them stop, which causes the bees to stop making honey due to oversupply, with the unintended consequence that all of the plants start to die because of no pollination from bees.  Barry figures this out, brings the last flowers on earth to New York, which the local bees use to re-pollinate all of the plants in the world, saving the day.  

There are lots of topical jokes about contemporary American culture, which will do a lot in making this a timeless classic of American cinematography.  Few, if any, of the jokes actually got me to crack a smile.  The characters were as two dimensional as the animation, the plot was disjointed and poorly thought out, and I never looked forward to the end of a movie so much in my entire life.


I don't want to say that there were no redeeming values to this.... film.  The animation was top notch.  Dreamworks has definitely figured out how to do computer animation to a degree that was undreamt of 20 years ago.  Jerry Seinfeld can occasionally run into a funny bit and exploit it successfully, which goes to prove the old saying about blind pigs and acorns.  The music chosen for it was pretty good and was similar to the contemporary music used in the Shrek franchise.  The producers and director obviously put a lot of work in getting top notch people such as Seinfeld and Larry King (who makes one of the only funny scenes in the movie work) to do voice over.  


But none of that can make up for the plot, character development, and endless stream of bad jokes.  I know, this was a cartoon, but it fails where Shrek and all of the Pixar movies succeed:  It doesn't engage across a wide swath of ages.  Boo was fascinated by the movie, but he's fascinated by the sandbox.  I was bored and insulted.


I cannot dis-recommend this film enough.  Jerry Seinfeld and  Dreamworks should be ashamed of themselves and should atone for their poor work by publicly flogging themselves with rose stems.  I swear that as the credits started to roll and I made a beeline to the eject button with the intention of taking this DVD to the range, I distinctly heard the baby Jesus crying.  


Oh, but the things we do to keep our spouses and children happy.