From the Archives: Bee Movie

From the pre-Talking Movies archives.

This is a bit of a conundrum to review. Don’t get me wrong, this is a good movie that features some hilarious gags. It is certainly several leagues above Dreamworks’ previous animated feature this year, the dire Shrek the Third. Jerry Seinfeld, who finally stopped doing stand-up to make this film, has really thought out the internal logic for his epic about bee society. The depiction of the worker bees that leave the hive to collect pollen is hilarious as they’re all jocks in a Top Gun style fighter squadron valorised by the rest of the hive. The sequence where Barry B Benson (voiced by Seinfeld) finally achieves his dream and flies with them on a sortie through the city is genuinely exciting. The problem is that while there are a number of great gags which are truly of the calibre you expect from a Seinfeld script the movie overall feels somewhat flat. This oddly deflating vibe is exemplified by the use of Chris Rock, who is hilarious but appears in just three scenes as the voice of a mosquito.

Despite the spirited protestations of Dreamworks Animation supremo Jeffrey Katzenberg there is no doubt that this film is less in thrall to celebrities than previous Dreamworks fiascos like Shark Tale. The presence of Patrick Warburton, who voices ultraviolent bodyguard Brock Samson in cult animated show The Venture Brothers, is testament to that. I have no idea what Warburton looks like, he’s a voice actor, and he’s hilarious as Ken, Vanessa’s jock boyfriend who has absurd self-confidence. In Shark Tale celebrities whose voices aren’t particularly memorable were made obvious by making all the anthropomorphic fish look exactly like the person voicing them. The characters were then made exactly like the screen persona of these stars. Which it must be admitted is about as far removed from the idea of an actor bending themselves into a role as is possible to imagine. Here Seinfeld is recognisable as a bee but no one else really is bar real human characters like Ray Liotta and Sting (both mocking themselves with gusto) and a gag about B Larry King.

The plot is very similar to Antz with an extremely neurotic Jewish insect (seriously, the amount of Jewish references here would appear excessive in a Woody Allen film) agonising over his life and his attempts to become an individualist in a conformist society. This is done in typically melodramatic Hollywood fashion by suing humans for stealing honey. The bees are helped by Renee Zellweger’s kind-hearted florist Vanessa for this showdown which should theoretically enable Barry’s hive to have more time for leisure and a life outside of work. But that’s not the end of the story. Seinfeld cleverly subverts the clichés established by Dreamworks’ ‘subversive’ films but it still doesn’t make this essential viewing.

3/5

Mr Peabody & Sherman 3-D

Rob Minkoff, director of Stuart Little, finally helms a movie adaptation of Rocky & Bullwinkle’s segment about an intelligent dog and his adopted human son.

Mr. Peabody (Ty Burrell) is a business titan, trailblazing inventor, gourmet chef, two-time Olympic medallist and universally recognised and beloved genius. And a dog. Using his most ingenious invention, the WABAC machine (cunningly pronounced Way Back), Mr. Peabody takes his adopted human son Sherman (Max Charles) to experience the French Revolution, and hang out with good friend Leo Da Vinci (Stanley Tucci), as a demented form of home-schooling to prepare him for the horrors of the American public school system. And what horrors they are. Viciously bullied on his first day, Sherman fights back and so Mrs Grunion (Allison Janney) threatens to remove him from Peabody’s care. Peabody invites the bully and her parents to dinner to smooth things over, but more taunts see Sherman use the WABAC to prove a point – and so kinda loses her in Ancient Egypt…

Mr Peabody & Sherman begins as sort of the ultimate Steven Moffat outing, with Whovian larking about in time and space, and Sherlockian calculation of surroundings to evade capture by utilising environment – not least an escape from the guillotine far more convincing than any of the explanations proffered for Sherlock’s equivalent magic trick. Sadly, apart from a nice moment in Troy and some mucking about in Luxor (featuring the greatest ‘Oy!’ you will hear in 2014), this joyous aspect fades away. Instead the great Patrick Warburton voices Agamemnon as a dim jock, and Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is plagiarised. If you watch Modern Family you’ll recognise Ty Burrell is using the voice he reserves for formal comic interaction with his on-screen dad. But at least he finally gets to be smarter than on-screen daughter Ariel Winter, voicing Penny Petersen.

Penny is a huge problem as this movie begins and ends with Peabody & Sherman’s relationship being a pointed metaphor for gay adoption, with Mrs Grunion in the ‘conservative’ corner as saying it’s just unnatural that a dog should adopt a boy. It’s hard to believe Craig Wright, who created the glorious Dirty Sexy Money, didn’t intend that obvious reading, and this makes it all the more baffling why we’re supposed to root for a romance between Sherman and Penny when she begins the movie as an obnoxious bully who issues a slur of what must be considered coded homophobic slurs at the inoffensive Sherman. Aside from the logic of placing such subtle agit-prop over children’s heads, at what point does continually depicting vicious bullying as how schools are help perpetuate vicious bullying in schools as just how schools are?

Mr Peabody & Sherman is reasonably entertaining, but you can’t help feel a version composed solely of madcap escapades without any dutiful, plodding story beats would’ve been more fun.

2.5/5