Seinfeld = Gallagher

The DVD cover of Bee Movie features a honeycomb, a toy car, and bees in various comic poses, all of them rendered with the classic kiddie-crack features: huge eyes, button noses, fuzzy antennae. A marketing jingle, emblazoned next to one particularly saucy bee, reads: "Honey just got funny."

Did it? Expectations were high. This was Jerry Seinfeld's vehicle, after all, his comeback, the receptacle into which he had poured his post-Seinfeld genius. He worked the promotional machine like a pro, appearing on various talk shows in a fuzzy bee costume (one grew accustomed to images of the bee-Seinfeld, complete with deely-bobbers and black tights, lounging on talk show chairs), giving interviews on the radio and television, concocting press releases. It was a publicity coup. People were talking. The vast reservoir of goodwill he'd built up during the run of his show served him well. Seinfeld? A comic genius. And come on, it was an intriguing premise. Offbeat. Jerry Seinfeld in a movie about bees. Called "Bee Movie." Get it? Chuckle. And, you could bring the kids!

A quick re-hash of the plot in case you've somehow managed to avoid this movie so far: a young bee (Seinfeld), facing a lifetime of work in the hive, takes a trip into the outside world where he discovers that humans are consuming the honey which the bees work so hard to make. A lawsuit follows. Hilarity, I am sure, was intended to ensue, but instead the movie descends into a sticky morass of unfunny from which it never manages to extricate itself.

The problems with the movie are legion, but it really all begins and ends with the star himself. Seinfeld, the comic, always managed to carry his audience along the razor's edge of annoyance and amusement. He projected the desperate, unwarranted hipness of a geek in denial. This tension was never acknowledged, nor did it form any basis for his comedy, and the deliberate eliding of his equine and pop eyed awkwardness left him a very small window of goodwill in which to work; it was into this window that he slipped his observational humor, his banal wordplay, and his conspiratorial asides. A sports analogy might work here: Seinfeld was the control pitcher, the guy who never threw above 80 miles an hour but who baffled and enraged the hitter with his control. You weren't going to get overwhelming comedic power from Seinfeld, but you might walk away impressed with his self-possession.

In his television show, Seinfeld had the good sense to stay somewhat in the background, playing the straight man, often leaving the spotlight to his co-stars. This sort of Seinfeld-in-small-doses strategy worked perfectly, but I don't know if anyone could've predicted the sort of disaster that would ensue should he step front and center. It was there, a lurking comedic calamity, just waiting for the right vehicle. Enter Bee Movie. We get two hours of the Seinfeld voice. That reedy, adenoidal, perpetually pubescent scratch-and-whine, rising and falling like the strenuous bleats of a child's flute lesson. This voice subjects us to a barrage of Seinfedian chestnuts: "Shave my head and start callin' everybody 'dawg'", "That is one nectar collector." Something in his delivery and pacing, honed through years of standup, keeps the mind engaged. You can't tune it out. You can bury your nose in a book, you can entomb your head in a pillow, and it will follow you.

The story or design, either of which might have rescued this movie, don't. The Voice (which seems to bore more and more deeply through the brain tissue with each viewing, threatening to someday impact and detonate one's molten core of rage) emanates from a fuzzy, outrageously cute bee (an anthropomorphization of Seinfeld's contrived standup cool) complete with the cocked eyebrow and the pipe cleaner legs. We move through a series of preposterous plot contrivances, set pieces cemented together by gratuitous fight scenes, a love story (another of the antiseptic seductions routinely performed by Seinfeld on his television show), and a legal battle. The movie, gathering momentum, rolls right through Courtroom Drama and on into Disaster, Teamwork, Saving the World, and Lessons Learned. Watching it, one can almost hear the writers brainstorming, working, struggling. It's as if they walked out of the room a year early. Where's the unity? Where's the character arc? Where are the laughs?

After repeated viewings of Bee Movie I am afraid my opinion of its star has been permanently altered. When Seinfeld went off the air, Larry David, one of the show's co-creators, began work on Curb Your Enthusiasm, a rather brilliant little series that seemed to carry forward the spirit of its predecessor. I began to wonder if the real comedic genius had been misidentified all this time, if perhaps Jerry Seinfeld had just found himself in the right place, at the right time, aligned with the right friends. Bee Movie answers that question in no uncertain terms and in the process relegates Seinfeld to second-rate status. Worse, it casts a pall back over his entire oeuvre. Was he ever really funny? The answer: not so much. Is it possible that Jerry Seinfeld is the new Gallagher? Watch Bee Movie a few times and it might not seem so preposterous.