Sting of defeat for 'Bee' is the plot

BY JAN STUART | Newsday Staff Writer

April 28, 2006

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The anthropologically-minded production notes of "Akeelah and the Bee" trace the film's roots to a eureka moment in 1994, when writer/director Doug Atchison channel-surfed his way from a basketball game to a spelling bee that was airing live on ESPN.

Since it's been 12 years, Atchison probably forgot the part where he headed to the kitchen for a beer, tripped on the living room carpet and dropped his script into a Mind-o-Matic. That, as those of you who saw "Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit" know, was Wallace's mechanically deficient invention for reprogramming rabbits.

This is as likely an explanation as any for why Atchison goes in with your basic oppressed class-nerd scenario and comes out at the other end with a feel-good Frankenstein monster, stitched together from the recycled body parts of every underdog athlete movie ever made.

Atchison's would-be hoops star, I mean, spelling bee whiz, is a bespectacled 11-year-old from South Los Angeles with a smile that could disarm a barracuda. In lieu of predatory fish, Akeelah (the charming Keke Palmer) finds herself caught between the distracted attentions of a grumpy-boots working mom (Angela Bassett) and a garden-obsessed academic, Dr. Larabee (Laurence Fishburne, flattened with mega-doses of Niagara starch) who thinks the girl has the right stuff to make the national spell-offs in Washington, D.C., albeit with the proper training.

Akeelah, egged on by her straight-arrow brother, ignores the knee-jerk protestations of her mother (preoccupied with Akeelah's bad-seed brother) to seek out coaching help from the supercilious Dr. Larabee. With the added support of a chipper young bee veteran named Terrence (the aggressively adorable Julito McCullum), Akeelah overcomes the obstacles of her have-not background and inches her way toward geek glory.

While the origins of "Akeelah and the Bee" would appear to predate the 2003 "Spellbound," there are peculiar echoes of Jeffrey Blitz's superb documentary, particularly in "Akeelah's" pasteboard variation on an arrogant young bee champ and his hard-driving father. Where "Spellbound" generated crackling suspense in its competition climax, "Akeelah" is virtually suspense-free, even with an attempt to wring a twist on its pre-determined outcome.

"Akeelah and the Bee" is being marketed as a family film, one of those dubious classifications that too often indicate an entertainment that patronizes adults and children indiscriminately. It is being distributed by a production company owned by Starbucks, who are endeavoring to do with movies what they did with coffee: jazz up the same old swill we've been drinking for years.

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