- guardian.co.uk,
- Friday May 23 2008 15:42 BST
Who thought we'd ever see a fat Seinfeld? After most of a decade improving his collection of cars and white sneakers - at a guess - Jerry Seinfeld returns as a bee, star and co-writer of a cartoon that's awfully pleasant without really achieving memorability.
Bee Movie comes from DreamWorks, reviving memories of toontown's great bug war of 1998, won decisively by Pixar's A Bug's Life - in which Seinfeld's former TV co-star Julia-Louis Dreyfuss was a key voice - over DreamWorks' Antz.
As a sitcom character, Seinfeld's default position (mild indignation) worked best with the more extreme characters surrounding him. Here, that only really applies in the film's latter courtroom stages, with John Goodman's orotund southern lawyer and Chris Rock's mosquito turned legal irritant ("I was already a blood-sucking parasite. All I needed was a briefcase," he explains of his career move in the film's best line.)
The main relationship - a pleasant bee and a pleasant human (Renée Zellweger's florist), who become friends - doesn't have much mileage. Overall, the film is sweet and charming, providing few belly laughs but plenty of smiles. It's to the movie's good fortune that this time, there's no Pixar equivalent (Polly Nation?) on the horizon.
