The Swarm

Directed by Irwin Allen, The Swarm follows several characters, including Michael Caine’s Brad Crane, Henry Fonda’s Walter Krim, and Olivia de Havilland’s Maureen Schuester, as they find themselves under attack by millions of deadly African bees. It’s a workable premise that is, for the most part, employed to tedious and, eventually, interminable effect by Allen, as the filmmaker, working from Stirling Silliphant’s screenplay, delivers an often astonishingly sluggish endeavor that grows less and less interesting (and more and more unwatchable) as time slowly progresses – with the absolutely ludicrous running time of 156 minutes doing little to allay the entirely endless atmosphere. And although Allen has admittedly punctuated the picture with a very small handful of engaging sequences, including (and especially) a trip aboard a doomed train full of passengers, The Swarm‘s arms-length vibe is perpetuated by its pervasive assortment of inept, incompetent elements and oddly low-rent atmosphere – with the latter certainly reflected most keenly in the chintzy-looking bunker in which much of the movie’s first half transpires. It’s worth noting, too, that the impressively stacked cast is generally unable to breathe any life into the hopelessly stagnant proceedings, with Caine’s frequently hysterical work here surely a low point within his hit-and-miss filmography, while the monotonous and thoroughly anticlimactic third act ensures that The Swarm peters out to a fairly shocking (albeit far from surprising) degree – with the end result a predominantly worthless entry within the notoriously erratic disaster-movie genre.

* out of ****

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