In theaters now, and buckle up because this one is a doozy. Hello everybody, I’m Admin with my review for The Beekeeper.
The Setup:
The Beekeeper, the latest film from David A. with the screenplay by Kurt Wimer whose career includes last year’s Expendables for law-abiding citizen and the remakes of Point Break, Total Recall, Children of the Corn, and The Thomas Crown Affair. And while most of those movies are 21st century releases, you cannot convince me that the script for this movie wasn’t written sometime before the Millennium and put in some kind of a hermetically sealed jar until now.
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The Beekeeper Plot:
Jason Statham plays Adam Clay, a former government special agent called a beekeeper, part of a program so secret even the CIA doesn’t know about it. The job of the beekeepers is to protect the hive AKA society, and we know this because Jason Statham says it about two dozen times in the movie, “I’m a beekeeper, I protect the hive.” Following his retirement as a government beekeeper, Adam Clay becomes an actual beekeeper for reasons the movie never really explains. It would be like if Hunt retired and then started a travel agency called The Impossible Missions Force. It’s not too hard to connect the dots there. Statham is enjoying his beekeeper retirement as a beekeeper until the elderly woman who lets him use her barn, played by Felicia Rashad, falls victim to a fishing scam and loses all of her money. In this movie, fishing scams are headquartered in offices that are straight out of every ’90s movie about hackers and run by knockoff Jordan Belforts in front of video screens. That is what I am talking about!
The Escalation:
After Felicia Rashad kills herself immediately after being scammed, The Beekeeper calls himself back into action to hunt down the people responsible, namely a Weasley tech bro played by Josh Hutcherson and his father, the former director of the CIA played by Jeremy Irons. And before you say that I’m spoiling the movie, that’s the first 15 minutes of the film. And if I gave you 25 tries to try to predict where this movie eventually goes, I can almost guarantee you wouldn’t even get close. The escalation in this movie is insane. And this is also the kind of movie that makes you feel insane while you’re watching it. The Beekeeper is one of the most inexplicable movies I’ve ever seen, which makes it both a treasure and an abomination. It’s the kind of movie that should never come out and also be released five times a year. It is one of the worst movies that I will definitely watch 30 more times in my life.
Analysis:
Let’s start with the screenplay, which is so terrible it’s almost its own work of art. It’s like a revenge movie was evolving independently into an Airplane!-style parody movie, but then that evolution stopped like halfway through, and so this is some sort of abomination that’s neither one of those things, which means this movie also includes incredible lines like, and I apologize my Jason Statham impression is not as good as my friend Spencer J. Gilbert’s, “Stealing from an elderly person’s as bad as stealing from a child, maybe worse.” I’d also like to add that in that conversation, the FBI agent daughter of Felicia Rashad played by Emmy Raver-Lampman also tells Jason Statham, “You know, I detect some British Isles in that accent,” as if he was speaking with some sort of a slight brogue and not like Jason Statham, the most British-sounding person I could possibly imagine other than maybe John Oliver.
In addition to just the worst dialogue (and I could quote you 10 more lines), there are so many other completely confusing decisions, like adding Mini Driver to the cast as the director of the CIA, giving her two scenes which make her seem extremely important, and then just having her completely disappear from the movie. Or when the movie introduces the most insane character that you’ve ever seen completely out of nowhere and then dispenses with that character after 30 seconds. Or the decision to introduce at least three teams of bad guys, each with its own colorful lead goon, only to switch those teams out constantly. And one of those bad guy squads has a leader with a South African accent that is so bad it’s either an actor who’s not South African doing an atrociously offensively bad accent or it’s an actor who is South African who’s making fun of how bad Hollywood usually gets South African accents.
Miscellaneous:
And then there are little things like this, and these are the things that I love in movies like this, the ones that make me want to take a university course into how they got made scene by scene. There’s a scene in the FBI field office, and they were lucky enough to include the scene as a publicity clip so I can give you a visual aid. Between the two investigator characters and in the background of the scene, dead center of frame, David A. has positioned two repairmen who are working on a leak in the ceiling. And all I could do throughout the 5-minute scene is stare at the guys fixing the ceiling leak because they’re right there in the master shot, they’re right in the center, the water’s dripping, it’s very obvious that they were staged there on purpose. And I’m thinking, okay, what are they doing there? Is Jason Statham one of the guys? Is he going to be listening in on their conversation? Is he going to flood the headquarters somehow and break in and steal information? Or is there going to be like a body that falls through the ceiling? Because obviously those guys are there for a reason. But they’re not. They’re not there for any reason. These two distracting repairmen are in the center of the master shot of a 5-minute scene for absolutely no reason at all, which leaves in my head two distinct possibilities: either David A. as a director was so incompetent that he didn’t realize how distracting it would be to put those two maintenance guys right in the center of the frame and never pay it off, or he was intentionally out to mess with your head to make you feel insane.
Conclusion:
And honestly, I don’t really care which one of those is the right answer. Every time I was convinced that The Beekeeper was too bad to be entertaining, it would prove me wrong and make me laugh my ass off genuinely. And every time I convinced myself that it was self-consciously bad on purpose, it would do something at a level of incompetent so monumental that it couldn’t have been on purpose. Beekeeper is a paradox. It’s like staring into the sun; you know you should look away, but you keep thinking that if you squint hard enough, maybe you can make something out. Jason Statham, for his part, does what Jason Statham does, which is to glower and kick things much like Arnold Schwarzenegger before him. He has mastered the art of delivering any kind of dialogue with this serious deadpan nature that you can’t really figure out. Are you supposed to be laughing at him? Or are you supposed to be laughing with him? Is he in on the joke? Or is he not in on the joke? I think that kind of makes him one of the modern action masters working right now.
Further Insights:
There’s so much more I could get into, like how every actor feels like they’re in a different movie, except for Jeremy Irons who feels like he’s in four different movies simultaneously. Or how it seems like for a movie that’s about cybercrime, no one involved seems to have a functioning knowledge of how cybercrime actually operates. But the main point is this: The Beekeeper is terribly hilarious and hilariously terrible. It’s the kind of movie that I know in my bones shouldn’t exist but also the kind of movie that I want to talk to each and every one of you individually about to hear what your thoughts on it were. So, for the first time, I’m actually giving it a double rating on my scale. My brain is simultaneously telling you to stay away from this film and see it now, which honestly I don’t mind. I’m giving it both ratings. And real talk here, I would rather watch 10 movies like this one that anger me and delight me in equal measure than one of those phoned-in January horror movies or the usual drek that we get at the beginning of the year. I’ve sat through so many of those things bored out of my skull because they’re not trying, they don’t care. This movie, I don’t know what it’s trying to do, but I was not bored for one second. The time flew by, and my mind was actively engaged trying to figure out exactly what was unfolding before me. I can’t tell you if it’s horrible, I can’t tell you if it’s great. I think it might be both, but I do think that you should probably go and see for yourself, if for nothing else than a great conversation walking out of the theater. So, those are my thoughts on The Beekeeper. What do you think? Let me know down in the comments below. I’m excited to hear what people say about this one. Maybe I’m the only one that had my mind blown by it. And stay tuned right here on the Post. I’ve got more movie news, reviews, box office, and more. Until next time, stay safe, and I’ll see you then.
