“Bee Movie” the product of a fevered, unimaginative mind

Jerry Seinfeld is insane. Not tragic-insane, like his buddy Michael Richards. Not amusing-insane, like my buddy Screamin’ Mad Nicolas Cage. Just regular old off-his-rocker, driven so completely mad by fame and power that he would engineer a massive vanity project like “Bee Movie.”

The self-propelled monument to his own genius is a CGI-animated film about anthropomorphic bees that one may be tempted to describe as Seinfeld’s own personal Spruce Goose—but you sort of realize that even Howard Hughes meant for his giant flying wooden boat to serve a purpose. Hell, it even defied the odds and managed to fly, however briefly and impractically. On the other hand, “Bee Movie” is such a stagnant and humorless film containing so many conflicting messages and ideas that I am at a loss to explain its presence or function.

Along with co-writing the film’s script and serving as the driving promotional force, Seinfeld also voices the protagonist, Barry, who is essentially what Seinfeld would be like if he was a bee: a tiny insect prone to screaming random, irrelevant observations in an irritating lilt. After graduating from bee school (or whatever), Barry looks forward to indulging in the opportunities in the job market that his hive has to offer—that is, until he learns that the profession he chooses now will be the one that he will maintain until the day he dies. After an unsuccessful foray into the outside world to gather his thoughts together, he meets a florist (Renee Zellweger) who briefly teaches him about the human world—a disturbing prospect as the young bee learns that mankind harvests his species’ honey for their own selfish consumption. As Barry sees it, there’s only one course of action to take: he must sue the human race for their thieving, underhanded tactics. The definitions allotted to this universe, its characters and its humanized bees are so ill-defined as to nullify any reasoning, consequence or humor behind anything that happens beyond this point, but hey, who cares? Jerry Seinfeld is in it, and that’s all that matters to him.

Of course, don’t expect Seinfeld’s stream-of-consciousness blather to carry the entire film, as much as the comedian would like you to think that it can. With this being an animated movie about anthropomorphized animals, you should be prepared for an assault of bee puns presented in the same way that “The Flintstones” assaulted you with rock puns some 40-odd years ago. But despite the fact that it takes these jokes completely at face value to a certain point, “Bee Movie” soon taught me that there’s only one thing more irritating than that: pointing out the puerility of these gags in the self-aware manner that has become so popular in post-modern society. This, too, is an idea that has been driven right into the ground and eventually revealed as a childish observational joke that solves nothing. Couldn’t we just skip the idea altogether and start from somewhere new? It shouldn’t come as a surprise that “Bee Movie’s” funniest moment comes from its human element—a non-sequitur cameo from Ray Liotta, here playing himself as a cold-hearted honey magnate, clutching his newly-won Emmy with a death grip.

But the film manages to stave off the puns long enough to fulfill the typical children’s-flick conceit of turning its final 10 minutes into a morality play. In this case comes the concept of “thinking bee,” which is introduced to us as dangerous groupthink through Barry’s reluctance to sign his life away to the hivemind. By film’s end, however, “thinking bee” has become a metaphor of finding one’s place in life and understanding that even the smallest, most insignificant worker lives to serve a greater purpose. Methinks that it’s meant to be uplifting, but the way that it’s shown to us—with all of the bees chanting the phrase in a scary drone as they perform the same rote exercise ad nauseam—never actively addresses the concerns brought up in its first act. Perhaps Seinfeld isn’t quite so crazy after all. Quite the contrary—maybe he had a few ideas in his head that didn’t quite work out until he realized that he was going after as wide an audience as possible, and subsequently filtered them through the Hollywood machine to achieve maximum potential. How foolish he had been! He loved Big Brother.