If you’ve ever wondered why someone would go out of their way to label themselves as a “cinephile” or purposely uses the word “film” when talking about movies, or watches foreign cinema that doesn’t involve song and dance sequences, it’s because they don’t want to be lumped into the 93% of viewers* who watched a movie called The Beekeeper and liked it.
So what’s the Buzz?
*By viewers I really just mean people who take flights on Virgin Atlantic and choose to watch a Jason Statham flick over the dozens of options presented to them, including films like Zone of Interest, or Peanut Butter Falcon, or Sting, or Dune 2. They chose this movie. So clearly, there’s a bit of bias involved in this 93% statistic. I know. I still want to be triggered though, so shut up.
I took some notes while watching this movie, and they begin with the opening sequence, which, in retrospect, did not really fit the tone of the movie. The opening sequence looks pretty much exactly like this:
There’s no reason for this. I’m sure that if I dug through the credits for Godzilla vs King Kong I’d find that the same people made these sequences, but I mean. What the hell, guys?
Then we’re off to the races. The opening scene is… atrocious. Statham speaks to his neighbor, and they have a poorly blocked, expositional, inhumane conversation about how the neighbor has been ‘taking care’ of Statham. The very next scene, shawty falls for a scam, and the plot is off to the races. It just… 0-100 dude. There are a few fairly convenient coincidences and some useless character developments when the neighbor’s daughter, Verona, is revealed to be, fairly conveniently, an FBI agent. Who is also, fairly conveniently, checking in on her mother the very same minute that superspy Statham discovers that his neighbor is in trouble.
Boom, bang, snappy one liners, and we’ve got ourselves a revenge tale fueling our action. The script wastes no time on anything like ‘character development’ or ‘nuance’ or other scams, like ‘personality’. We have line after line of redundant, unoriginal, straight-to-the-point exposition that only serves to point to the progression of the movie.
I want to stop here and admit that maybe this movie was meant to be this way? Straight to the point? Simple? Almost like another revenge action tale about a retired spy who operates outside of the known political structures of the world. Almost like… John Wick?!
A Hive of Spies and Secrets
The only interesting element to this film comes from the fact that the titular Beekeeper is actually a codeword for a spy structure that exists outside the American political and justice systems that can act unilaterally to maintain order and prevent unchecked power. Coincidentally, we’re also told, twice, at least, that there are ‘assassin bees’, which exist to kill the queen bee in case she produces terrible offspring, because that threatens the hive. So Statham decides to ‘protect the hive’.
The film does a terrible, terrible job of trying to hide the twist, despite its hammer-shaped foreshadowing of its elementary-school-level metaphors. It was almost insulting the way the movie makes it a big deal when they reveal the twist.
So like I said, if we say that ok, fuck the nuance, this movie is just an action film with secret spies, like John Wick, then ok. That’s more palatable. As long as the action is fun and unique. Or that we get to actually see the badass be a badass. Or as long as we’re not just told that the protagonist is scary and badass. Oh? No? None of the above? Then what the fuck was the point of this shit?
Honey, is it over?
Especially once we get to the end of the film, which is quite predictable up until the last… 60 seconds? And I really do mean up until the very last tightly-edited, shaky-cam, quick-fire sixty seconds before the credits roll. Because the main antagonist, some uppity millennial CEO who’s running the scams decides to slam some cocaine in front of the president of the united states, demands that his mommy do something about the super spy blowing up their family vacation home, shoots the 2nd in command of some US defense branch, and then threatens to shoot his mother for… reasons? I mean. What the fuck? What’s that do? What does that accomplish? Super spy assassin wasn’t going to stop because you threatened your own mommy. The FBI agent arrives at the same time, and they have a tense standoff about ‘justice’ versus ‘doing the right thing’, and Verona lets the guy go at the last second.
The final 30 seconds of the film, following the 30 seconds of the above climax, are a long, stupid sequence of Statham walking down to the beach, shedding his suit, putting on a scuba diving outfit, and disappearing into the ocean. Cut to black. I mean what the fuck was that?! That has to be the most jarring, lazy, inept, creatively-bankrupt, characterless ending to any movie I have ever seen. No other resolution? Justice? Absolution? Satisfaction? Oh, and I’m sorry, did the kid just randomly try to kill his own mom? Why? What does “goodbye mom” accomplish?
Christ almighty.
Shoutout to the only bright stops of this film, from brightest to dimmest:
- Verona’s FBI partner is a sarcastic, witty, ethnically ambiguous dude who’s pretty funny. I’d like to see more of that.
- Jeremy Irons is in this movie, playing the role of ‘ex-CIA director who is scared shitless and acts like a whiny child’. He’s certainly just in it for the paycheck, and even his final scene is lazy. He tries talking Statham out of violence, gets his finger broken, is told to sit down, and we never see him again. I think he had the most screen time in this film by far.
- There’s some unnamed antagonist wearing a yellow raincoat who appears in the final sequence of the film, who has a squad of cowboy machine gun yahoos. He’s got a really fun accent that I can’t really place, and he’s at least visually interesting. I think he’s meant to be a wasp or something because Statham is a bee.
If you didn’t think my review did enough to explain to you how ridiculous this movie was, here’s the Reddit thread discussing it, wherein everyone’s like, “hah this movie was fucking stupid, I loved it”.
If you couldn’t already guess, I thought The Beekeeper was
YMMV
I saw it on an airplane, but you can choose to ignore the film when you’re on Amazon or Fubo.
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