Man v. Bee

 Man v. Bee is 2022 Netflix comedy series, divided into 9 chapters.  Starring Rowan Atkinson, the British comedian famous for his persona, Mr. Bean, the film's premise is elegantly simple:  a hapless half-wit finds work house-sitting in a hyper-modernist home owned by snooty Euro-trash and filled with priceless artwork, a mischievous (and sometimes incontinent) dog and a big yellow bumble-bee.  What could go wrong?  The show is entertaining and completely unchallenging -- it's so easy to watch that viewers will go from Chapter 1 to Chapter 9 without any pause at all.  Individual "chapters" seem to be about ten minutes long and the whole series, if it can be so characterized, is over in 90 minutes.  The show requires no investment of effort by the viewer and, if truth be told, repays the viewer with only modest laughs.  It's a perfect diversion but nothing more, akin to a pop song with a catchy riff that you enjoy hearing but that doesn't interest you enough to learn the lyrics of the tune or, even, the name of the band that performs it.  

Man v. Bee is efficient entertainment:  the premise is set up in the first minute or so and the program, then, proceeds predictably toward ever-increasing destruction and mayhem until, in the last scenes, the hero is stalking about the sci-fi house with a flame-thrower blasting fire at art masterpieces.  The irritating small dog is crushed under a projectile in the backyard and a two-million pound-sterling Jaguar is crashed and burning near the corpse of the dog.  (The show is mostly family-friendly -- viewers shouldn't despair as to the dog:  don't worry -- the critter is only wounded and will survive.)  The agent of all this destruction is the pesky bee that persecutes the house-sitter and evades all his attempts to capture or kill it.  On a couple of occasions, Atkinson's hero, who has apparently suffered a humiliating divorce, refrains from murdering his endearing, fluffy and bright orange antagonist, an animal characterized as a drone driven from his hive and alone, although he quickly repents of his mercy and returns to the fray escalating his pursuit of the insect until the entire house and its cargo of art lie in ruins around him.  Man v. Bee is true to its premises, as stripped down as a theorem by Euclid, and doesn't deviate from its theme:  man tries to swat bee but instead smashes a priceless statue or defaces a canvas by Piet Mondrian.  There are a couple of apparent detours from this theme and its variations:  the hero has an annoyingly judgmental ex-wife and an adoring daughter with whom he has a rather cloying long-distance relationship -- the man and his daughter are planning a camping (caravan) excursion to the Isle of Wight much deferred by the mayhem at the house.  A police officer intervenes on occasion to act as a foil to Atkinson's increasingly bizarre behavior and there are a trio of burglars as inept and hapless as the hero (they seem to have wandered in from a Home Alone movie); the robbery seems inconsequential but, in fact, is a cleverly concealed plot point that motivates the film's happy ending.  I note that in real life Rowan Atkinson is a car aficionado who, in fact, seems to specialize in wrecking fantastically valuable vehicles and this theme is also evident in Man v. Bee.  

The movie is relentlessly cheerful despite all the destruction  and without any foul language, although there are some off-color gags involving dog shit and a scene in which Atkinson's character does a sort of burlesque dance thrusting his pelvis repeatedly at the nonplussed cop -- he has a bee in his crotch.  The colors are bright and primary and the editing and mise-en-scene completely lucid.  The sight-gags all work, although some of them are less funny than others.  The poor pooch is almost killed twice but survives so that no one will leave this show with any concerns about the dog (named Cupcake).  The movie is like a poor man's Jacques Tati without the French comedian's sometimes surreal and  highly abstract gags.  Tati is so cerebral that he often forgets to be funny.  Man v. Bee similarly isn't as funny as it hopes to be -- but it's amusing from beginning to end.  There's a motif in films, dating as far back as The Black Cat and North by Northwest that vicious European villains live in ultra-modernist houses -- this movie exploits that motif:  the house is a perverse character itself in the movie and its condescending owners are evil and corrupt.  Everything in the house is voice- or gesture-activated and doors crucial to the action require weird passwords -- of course, the hero gets stuck in digitally activated cat entrance to the home.  The only jarring feature in the film is that the hero's antagonist is a bumble-bee -- it's hard to imagine a bee as being malicious and, in light of hive-collapse syndrome and other maladies affecting these useful pollinating insects, the viewer ends up rooting for bee.