Akeelah and the Bee (2006)

(On Cable TV, November 2022) I definitely slept on Akeelah and the Bee when it first came out, but it’s never too late to sing the praises of a genuinely enjoyable film. In many ways, it pairs quite well with Denzel Washington’s The Great Debaters—they’re both stories of para-academic achievement featuring black casts, a traditional reverence for higher education, and clearly go for uplifting finales from very humble roots. They even both have wise mentor characters, in this case Laurence Fishburne (in a somewhat rare kindly turn) as a linguistic academician who is convinced to coach an eleven-year-old girl from a troubled family. Taking place in circa-2006 South Los Angeles (and beyond), there isn’t much in Akeelah and the Bee that feels particularly new or original (especially fifteen years later, and a spate of movies featuring young black heroines) but the charm of the film is in its execution—solid character work from Fishburne, a breakthrough role of sorts for Keke Palmer, straightforward helming from writer-director Doug Atchison, a good use of detail to evoke the world of competitive spelling, and a scope that draws in adults as much as younger audiences. It ends more or less like you’d expect, and that’s a further point in its favour.