As the first film brewed and served by the Starbucks MegaGloboCorporation, Akeelah and the Bee is a surprisingly sweet, simple movie which utilises all the cliches and dramatic techniques of sporting movies and transplants them into a film about a young girl competing in a national spelling bee. Let me just reiterate, this is easily the most cliched movie of all time, there is hardly a fresh idea of even a vague twist on any of the standard plot points. Reluctant hero? Check. Tortured mentor? Check. A parent who is against the whole thing initially? Check, and so on. The only thing that actually makes you double-take is the fact that, as a single-person sporting movie (unlike the team elements inherent in football, basketball etc), the lead characters competitors are actually reasonably friendly. Well at least one of them.
Starring the astonishingly capable and effective Keke Palmer as the titular Akeelah, the film does manage to touch most of the right buttons without becoming overly mawkish. Where other directors might load on the stress, grief and so on, Atchison (possibly bound by who he was working for) keeps it quite simple and down-to-earth. There are no deaths of major characters, no unnecessary sub-plots. All there is is a young girl and a lot of big words. Laurence Fishburn perfectly recreates his Morpheus role from The Matrix, aiding and enthusing Akeelah along her journey, and Angela Bassett is unnecessarily beautiful as Akeelah's hard-working, education-obsessed mother.
The most important and ground-breaking issue at hand is the casting of a black family as the heroes of a story about intellectual achievement. Fishburn's Dr Laraby even chastises Akeelah for her ghetto speech at one point, making clear that in order to succeed in life one must drop the facade of stupidity and ignorance. As a role model for young black girls Akeelah is perfect, and the whole film could serve as a wake-up call to the Black community in the US regarding what they can achieve should they ever wish to. A more powerful message in a family-friendly film there has not been for quite some time. |
