'Bee Movie' has no sting

The secret life of bees as told by Jerry Seinfeld is definitely a "B" for boring. During the 90 minutes, there was one line that made me chuckle while the kids in the audience were alternately crying and being taken out for a potty break. "Bee" feels like a killer 15-minute short stretched into an OK feature-length movie.

Who is the target audience for "Bee Movie," Jerry Seinfeld's much-hyped dip into the now-crowded pool of animated kids' movies? As near as I can figure, it is 8 year olds who read the Entertainment section.

For the last two months, there has been so much hype about the "Bee Movie" that you would have thought it was the Return of the Something Really Big, at least for Jerry Seinfeld. And perhaps for him it was. But this veteran of a show about nothing has created a kid film with not enough going on.

Though it's cleverly conceived, "Bee Movie" never rises above the cuteness of its premise. Barry B. Benson (Seinfeld) is a graduating worker bee (class of 9:30 a.m.) who is horrified by the sudden

realization that the "job" he chooses in the hive will be what he does for the rest of his life. Barry got "a perfect report card: all B's, and lives with his parents in a hive that looks like something out of The Jetsons. He is preparing for a lifetime of honey-related labor, like every other bee in New Hive City, for a corporation known as Honex. However, Barry wants to see the world.

Abandoning his conformist friend Adam Flayman (Matthew Broderick) to take an unauthorized flight with the "pollen jockeys" (a warrior class reminding me of the soldiers in Antz), Barry has a mildly amusing adventure stuck to a tennis ball, gets stuck in a rainstorm and ends up in the apartment of Vanessa the florist (a lackluster Renee Zellweger). There, he does the unthinkable -- he breaks the No. 1 bee rule by talking to a human. When he later visits a grocery store with Vanessa, he deduces that humans are "stealing" the bees' honey and profiting from it, prompting Barry to sue the human race on behalf of his fellow insects.

The beautifully rendered scenes of flight are key to the film's best action scenes. Unfortunately, there are relatively few of them. One of these is when Barry embarks on a journey to find the factory-apiary that is responsible for the biggest theft of honey. Along the way he meets the only laugh-out-loud character in the movie, a mosquito named Mooseblood (Chris Rock) who, unfortunately, is only in for two cameos (in the second of which, he utters the movie's single funniest line).

Those are the makings of a sweet little coming-of-age comedy, but Seinfeld and company push the idea a little bit too far. Before you know it, "Bee Movie" has become a courtroom dramedy dancing around the idea of reparations for slavery (!) and mixed with a dicey message about the importance of filling your ecological niche.

In fact, the courtroom scenes, which feature Oprah Winfrey as a judge and John Goodman as a human attorney, are arguably the film's best. There's also a weird sort of environmental message that suggests that humans stealing honey is necessary to keep bees working to pollinate flowers.

See anything here yet that might keep your kid glued to his seat for 90 minutes?

"Bee Movie" is rated PG for a few mildly suggestive references, toilet humor and other mild crudities, animated violence (insect attacks, vehicular mayhem) and some brief drug content (bug sprays, as well as an intravenous use of honey). I rate it B for Boring, B for Bland, B

for too much Buzz. The "Bee Movie" is not likely to become a classic.