The Beekeeper Review – 'Just absolute bee-movie trash' – Empire

Bees have had a foul run of it on display. For each Candyman, there’s a Jupiter Ascending; for each movie just like the award-winning 2019 Macedonian documentary Honeyland, there’s Nicolas Cage screaming, “Killing me gained’t carry again your goddamn honey!” in The Wicker Man. David Ayer’s The Beekeeper, the newest motion automobile for Jason ‘The Stath’ Statham, doesn’t precisely give everybody’s favorite pollinating bugs a glittering second on the silver display. But when nothing else, it actually mentions them so much.

Right here, Statham performs a retired member of ‘Beekeepers’: a kind of extrajudicial super-spy authorities businesses you usually see in movies like this, the type that will get the job carried out when no-one else can (see additionally: Mission: Inconceivable’s IMF; Coronary heart Of Stone’s The Coronary heart; The A-Crew). For some cause, his public life — a horrible cowl! — can also be as an _actual_beekeeper, simply to ram the entire bee thought dwelling.

The script, by Kurt Wimmer (additionally partly chargeable for Statham’s final movie, the risible Expend4bles), by no means misses a possibility to remind us that bees are the important thing theme. “You have been a busy bee,” notes one character. “You kicked the beehive and now we have now to reap the whirlwind,” says one other. “Who the fuck are you, Winnie-The-Pooh?” is among the higher traces. A valiant try at an old style action-movie one-liner, in the meantime, is catastrophically inept: “To be or to not be” earns the comeback, “To bee!”, an alternate which makes zero sense even in a movie that has over-strenuously devoted itself to bees.

The script, and Ayer’s course, appear determined to wish to be in on the joke. The unhappy reality is, with bee analogies extra tortuous than the Stath’s killing strategies, you’re way more more likely to be laughing at it than with it. Nearly fully witless, it’s as in the event that they’ve selected the title first, after which needed to retrofit a cheapo motion film across the theme of bees. A lot simply doesn’t make sense: why is the previous director of the CIA speaking about honey? Why is an FBI particular agent discussing pollination strategies?

It’s spectacular and noteworthy that Statham can in some way make a beekeeping outfit look macho. However even he can’t elevate these things. Like his Hobbs & Shaw co-star Dwayne Johnson, there’s a type of repetitive homogeneity to Statham’s roles: all seemingly interchangeable robust guys, all with the identical unusual mid-Atlantic snarl (“There’s some British Isles hiding in your accent,” notes one character kindly), the identical rigorously cultivated stubble, the identical implacable grimace, the identical impervious-to-bullets effectivity.

Statham is as gruffly convincing as he normally is (although it’s 20 minutes earlier than he’s even allowed to kick any ass), however the motion scenes are horribly inconsistent: fantastic within the hand-to-hand stuff, sloppy elsewhere. It’s all wildly over-edited and wildly over-lit, too, just like the worst of Michael Bay’s vices, and it’s very onerous to care about any of the fights, given we all know so little about any of the characters: simply The Stath, grimly dispatching faceless, countless dangerous guys with impunity, as is his wont. If that’s all you’re after, you ought to be glad — however you do should put up with various stuff about bees, too.