Jason Statham is smoking out those hornets when he goes after some scammers, but does this actioner leave Film Brain buzzing?
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00:00 This video is sponsored by Entertainment Earth.
00:02 Hello and welcome to Projector, and on this episode Jason Statham is putting the sting on the bad guys as the beekeeper.
00:10 [music]
00:26 Adam Clay, played by Jason Statham, is a retired beekeeper, a secret clandestine organisation,
00:33 living quietly in a barn he rents from Eloise Parker, played by Felicia Rashad.
00:38 When Eloise takes her own life after losing all of her money in a phishing scam,
00:42 Adam becomes determined to track down who is responsible,
00:45 and unravels a conspiracy leading to companies owned by Derek Danforth, played by Josh Hutcherson,
00:51 and nothing is going to stop Adam from going right to the top of the hive.
00:55 The beekeeper is a teaming of two tabs with rather dubious reputations in the action genre.
01:01 On the one hand we have director David Ayer, who, full credit to him, I have like some of his work in the past,
01:07 Fury in particular, but ever since that incredibly awful Suicide Squad movie has pretty much been on a losing streak.
01:14 And on the other hand we have writer Kurt Vimmer, and if you're a long time fan of this channel,
01:19 you know that I have a lot of issues with Vimmer's work going right back to Equilibrium,
01:25 and somehow Vimmer has managed to fail upwards as a writer, despite the fact that he has credits like
01:30 Ultra Violet, Law Abiding Citizen, the remakes of Total Recall or Point Break, all terrible,
01:38 but somehow Vimmer still writes major action movies. I don't get it.
01:44 So putting these two together is very much the opposite of a dream team,
01:49 and I do have to admit that I felt some bad buzz towards the beekeeper.
01:54 So I was actually kind of surprised at how entertained I was at it, but not because it's good,
02:01 but because it is kind of bad in an entertaining way.
02:06 Full disclosure by the way, I am reviewing this from a screener, but they have no input over this review,
02:11 nor do they get to see it before I post it.
02:14 It becomes very apparent fairly early on in the beekeeper exactly what it's trying to do.
02:18 It's trying to launch a new franchise for Jason Statham,
02:22 and it does that by shamelessly pilfering from two of the biggest action franchises of the last decade,
02:27 The Equalizer and John Wick, and just putting them together into the same character.
02:33 You can clearly see traits of both of them in the beekeeper.
02:37 The fact that the title character, Clay, of course not his real name, much like McCall in the Equalizer movies,
02:44 he's a retired agent of a secret clandestine organization,
02:49 and he gets called out to help the underprivileged that are being exploited by criminal enterprises
02:55 that are above the touch of the law, much like Denzel Washington's Equalizer in those movies.
03:02 But of course, you also have the fact that he's avenging the death of someone that he loved
03:07 in the same way that John Wick is as well.
03:10 And those comparisons only become more evident the more the movie goes on,
03:15 particularly in a sequence where he takes out a group of bad guys in a barn,
03:20 and he's stringing them up from the ceiling.
03:22 And at that point, I was having severe deja vu of the climax of the first Equalizer movie,
03:27 where Denzel Washington is pretty much doing the same thing in a hardware store.
03:31 But the thing is, John Wick and McCall in the Equalizer movies, they had personalities.
03:36 We knew what their characters were about, and they were both played by charismatic performers.
03:41 And Statham can be a charismatic performer.
03:44 He might not have a huge amount of range,
03:46 but still, he can be surprisingly charming and self-effacing despite being a tough guy.
03:52 And yet in The Beekeeper, he's remarkably stoic, and the script gives him very little to play.
03:59 There's not a lot to the character of Clay.
04:03 Largely, all we do know about him is that he likes bees, he has a high moral compass,
04:09 he's very good at beating up bad guys, oh, and he likes bee puns.
04:14 That's the defining character trait of Statham in this movie.
04:17 He's dropping more bee puns than Arnold Schwarzenegger dropped ice puns as Mr. Freeze
04:23 in Batman and Robin.
04:25 But imagine that if it was delivered with absolute po-face seriousness like Statham does here.
04:32 It's absolutely hilarious.
04:34 He's dropping hornets into every single conversation, even when it's not necessary.
04:40 Oh, sometimes they leave them dealing with the hornets.
04:44 Sometimes I like to smoke out the hornets as he's pouring gasoline on people's desks.
04:49 It's amazing.
04:50 Like, it's not even up to the level of allegory, it's just straight-up mixed metaphors.
04:54 But Statham has never been more Sagao-like than he is in this movie.
04:58 For a start, he has very little dialogue, and what little there is is often quite monosyllabic.
05:04 He's just showing up largely for the action set pieces,
05:07 and he's just taking them on completely single-handed,
05:11 and they lay not a single scratch on him for most of the movie.
05:15 In fact, a lot of the time in the fight sequences, they don't get a hand on him.
05:19 He's just decimating wave after wave of bad guys,
05:23 exactly in the same way that Sagao is often completely invincible in his movies.
05:30 And then, when the action beats die down,
05:32 Statham just disappears for extended stretches of the movie.
05:35 There's 10-minute stretches of The Beekeeper where Statham is just completely off-screen.
05:41 So, a lot of the actual plot and exposition in the movie is actually handled by an FBI agent for him,
05:46 played by Emmy Raver Lampman, who is the daughter of Eloise,
05:50 the woman The Beekeeper was renting the barn from in the first place.
05:54 And despite the fact that her mother has recently passed by her own hand,
05:58 she doesn't seem to have all that much grief about it.
06:00 In fact, aside from a bit of mild day-drinking and showing up to a crime scene
06:05 with a hangover, she just seems to just handle it like any other case,
06:10 which is a little bit odd because you might think that it's personally related to her mother.
06:14 That might actually be a bit of a conflict of interest,
06:17 and she might need to be reassigned or maybe taken off on leave.
06:21 But no, she just follows The Beekeeper despite all this.
06:24 And I have to admit that this performance is absolutely bizarre.
06:29 There are moments where she's looking at the barn as it's been burnt out later,
06:34 and she just offhandedly goes, "I lost my virginity in that barn."
06:39 What? What does that have to do with anything? Why did she need to even mention that?
06:44 There's another moment where she takes a beekeeping book
06:48 out of a burnt-out petrol station, and later she's reading it,
06:52 and she goes, "Bees are interesting little shits."
06:56 I mean, full credit to the actress for trying to deliver those pearls of wisdom in the dialogue.
07:02 This character only exists to deliver exposition
07:05 because there are long patches where Statham just disappears.
07:08 We don't get any sense of his working or trying to uncover the conspiracy for himself a lot of the time.
07:14 We have to have these characters try and pull all the pieces together
07:18 after Statham's already done it and try to work out what exactly he's doing.
07:23 It's very weird. It means that we're always at a distance from Clay as a character.
07:29 He's an enigma, but not in a good way. He's just not interesting.
07:33 He's just not on screen a lot of the time, and he doesn't seem to have any kind of interior life.
07:39 It's a very odd scripting choice.
07:41 Oh, and I completely forgot to mention the early scene where Verona, the FBI agent,
07:46 is talking to Clay at her mother's table and says something to the effect of,
07:50 "I'm detecting some British Isles lurking in your accent."
07:54 Really? Was it particularly hiding at all?
07:57 This is Jason Statham we're talking about.
08:00 That's like having a conversation with Jean-Claude Van Damme and going,
08:03 "Huh, you sound a little bit Belgian."
08:06 No kidding!
08:07 And when I mention this stuff, it makes it sound like the movie is self-aware and tongue-in-cheek.
08:12 And yeah, there are a couple of moments where characters go,
08:14 "Oh, what? You ticked off a beekeeper? Big deal."
08:18 But the thing is, the film is actually remarkably serious and sincere,
08:23 despite the fact that it's absolutely ridiculous.
08:26 Jason Statham is actually listed as a producer on this movie,
08:30 and I genuinely think that he believes in this film
08:32 because it tackles with the social issue of the elderly getting scammed.
08:37 That's a big problem in society these days,
08:40 and the movie pretty much uses it as its equivalent of John Wick's dog getting killed.
08:46 Like, this is the act that's going to instigate and justify the entire rest of the narrative,
08:51 no matter how wild and crazy it gets from that point.
08:56 So, the opening 10 minutes of the movie largely focuses on Felicia Rashad
09:00 as the victim of this phishing scam,
09:03 and she delivers an actually genuinely realistic and heartbreaking performance
09:08 as someone that is not especially tech-literate getting led down the garden path.
09:14 She is just hook, line, and sinker for this scam,
09:19 and then, when she realises exactly what has happened,
09:22 it's absolutely devastating.
09:25 You can see how much she feels like her life has been destroyed in one single moment.
09:31 That is a hard shot of reality.
09:33 But while all this is going on,
09:35 the movie cuts to the other side of the line at the call centre,
09:39 where they've got these massive TV screens in the background,
09:42 neon fluorescent lighting in the ceiling,
09:45 rows upon rows of people sat at their computers.
09:49 It's like an eSports convention,
09:52 complete with a hooting and hollering host,
09:54 who is cackling away as this poor woman falls for his scam.
09:59 It is absolutely cartoonish and over the top
10:03 to the point where any semblance of reality just goes right out of the window.
10:08 But later in the movie, they manage to top this because, in another call centre,
10:12 they've literally got the faces of scammed elderly people
10:16 in the background on those TV screens.
10:18 You see just these sad old faces of people that they've exploited
10:23 just to really hammer this home,
10:26 in case the fact that he's constantly dropping the F-bomb
10:29 and being incredibly unsavoury wasn't a key enough
10:33 that these are awful, terrible people.
10:36 Essentially, a lot of the first half of the film
10:38 is Statham just working his way through a bunch of obvious straw men,
10:43 the kind of people that are so absolutely defenceless
10:46 that when he corners them, they just whimper,
10:49 going, "Don't hurt me, bro! Don't hurt me, bro!
10:52 I could get you an NFT!"
10:54 That's the kind of people that he's taking down
10:57 for a lot of the first half of the movie,
10:59 and lastly, it relies on the audience's satisfaction
11:02 of seeing these absolute a-holes get what they deserve,
11:06 lastly, getting pulled off the end of a bridge
11:09 by a truck screaming as they die.
11:11 And chief amongst these is Josh Hutchison as Derek Danforth,
11:15 a coke-snorting nepo baby,
11:16 and Hutchison is clearly having way more fun with this role
11:19 than he was with the entirety of Five Nights at Freddy's,
11:22 playing an amalgamation of Logan Paul and Alfie Allen from John Wick,
11:26 who spends most of his time skateboarding around the office
11:29 and generally being quite insufferable,
11:31 the kind of person that waltzes up at a party and goes,
11:33 "I think this cryptocurrency's really gonna blow up, bro."
11:37 Hutchison is revelling in getting to play someone just absolutely reprehensible
11:41 and is just riding on the coattails of his vastly successful mother,
11:45 who has managed to parlay that into a political career
11:47 and is clearly not so subtly based on Hillary Clinton
11:52 and is played in this film's case by Jenna Redgrave,
11:55 who seems to be taking the material maybe a little bit too seriously,
11:59 especially in the later section of the movie,
12:02 and her company is under the control of Jeremy Irons,
12:04 who is the former director of the CIA,
12:06 and Irons is way overqualified for this kind of material,
12:10 basically being Michael Nyquist from the first John Wick,
12:14 the only person that is aware of just how shrewd Derek is in his situation,
12:18 even as he tries to mop it up,
12:20 but it eventually devolves into him providing a bit of gravitas
12:23 to several Seagal speeches delivered to multiple sets of characters.
12:28 If you've ever seen a Steven Seagal movie,
12:30 there's always a point where one of the characters
12:32 gives a glowing speech about Seagal's character,
12:36 saying that he's the baddest man who ever badded,
12:38 he's unstoppable, and he's coming for you.
12:42 I'm paraphrasing, of course.
12:44 Midway through the movie,
12:46 Irons walks into a room of heavily armed former Navy SEALs
12:51 and gives them this big speech about the beekeeper,
12:54 ultimately telling them that compared to him, they're all pussies.
12:58 Unfortunately, as the film progresses,
13:00 Irons becomes much less important,
13:03 and ultimately, you wonder why his character's in the movie
13:07 after the halfway point,
13:08 because he doesn't seem to have a role anymore,
13:10 especially given the way he's flippantly discarded near the end of the film.
13:14 Although spare a thought for Minnie Driver,
13:16 who plays the current director of the CIA that Irons draws in for help,
13:20 who appears to have had most of her role left on the cutting room floor,
13:23 because she only appears in a handful of very brief scenes
13:25 in the middle of the movie despite prominent billing,
13:28 and then just completely disappears.
13:30 I hope she got paid well,
13:31 but mostly, the beekeeper evades a revolving door of intelligence organizations
13:36 like the FBI and the CIA
13:38 as he goes further and further up the conspiracy,
13:41 and when he reveals just how high up it goes,
13:44 I was actually laughing out of my chair at that moment.
13:49 I was hysterical, not least of which because genuinely,
13:52 it's accompanied with a big dramatic dun-dun-dun musical stinger,
13:57 which only amplified the absolute silliness of it.
14:01 But after a certain point,
14:02 that catharsis in seeing Statham absolutely annihilate a group of scammers
14:06 starts to wear off as he starts to battle against ostensibly more formidable opponents,
14:10 and he just goes through them like a knife through warm butter.
14:14 It's the kind of movie where Statham's Clay walks deliberately
14:17 into the middle of a group of heavily armed FBI guys
14:21 standing outside of a building that roughly outnumber him about 10 to 1 or so,
14:25 and he just decimates them without any of them laying a hand on him whatsoever,
14:30 and he walks into the building barely even ruffled.
14:33 And this goes back to the fact this was written by Kurt Wimmer.
14:37 You might recall in those reviews way back when mentioning that
14:40 Wimmer really likes his invincible heroes.
14:43 He doesn't like tension or conflict in his action scenes.
14:47 He likes his action heroes to be absolutely dominant,
14:51 and the thing is, that isn't very interesting,
14:55 and you see this in The Beekeeper,
14:57 where the more the action scenes start occurring,
15:00 the more repetitive they start to feel
15:03 because no one actually even gets close to him until the very end of the movie.
15:08 The Beekeeper never feels like he's in any kind of jeopardy,
15:12 and that's the difference between something like this and John Wick.
15:15 John Wick may be the Baba Yaga, but he's not completely unstoppable.
15:19 In fact, John Wick often gets seven bells knocked out of him during the fight scenes,
15:25 but he gets back up again,
15:27 and each of those action sequences have different choreographies.
15:31 They always try and make them feel varied,
15:33 and often Wick is using his wit to try and get past his opponents.
15:39 That makes the fight scenes feel different.
15:42 It makes them feel compelling and interesting,
15:44 and have some semblance of tension about them,
15:47 whereas in The Beekeeper, you really don't feel that at all
15:51 because you just know that Statham is just going to go through the next set of bad guys,
15:56 and they're just going to reintroduce another bunch for him to go through in the next sequence
16:01 over and over again.
16:03 Even worse, it's to such an extent that undermines the film's world building.
16:07 The whole movie is setting up the idea of this secret organisation of beekeepers,
16:12 agents that are nearly unkillable,
16:15 and wouldn't you know it, they send a current active beekeeper after Clay to try and stop him.
16:22 And you think, "Oh, that's interesting.
16:24 In any other movie, that would be Jorn's secondary antagonist,
16:28 one that he would keep bumping into over the course of the movie.
16:32 They would be very similarly trained, and they would know each other's tactics."
16:36 Well, not in this movie, because this beekeeper comes in at a petrol station
16:42 with a truck that has a minigun on the back of it,
16:45 dressed like an extra out of A's Suicide Squad movie,
16:49 blasts that minigun, which fires out purple and green bullets
16:53 like it's operated by Harley Quinn,
16:55 and then they have a fight scene which maybe lasts about 30 seconds after that.
17:02 Statham absolutely demolishes this woman, and then that's it.
17:07 That beekeeper's dead. She's out of the movie completely.
17:10 And it makes a complete mockery of this setup if Statham absolutely wrecks her
17:15 in almost record time.
17:17 I've seen wrestling squash matches that lasted longer than this.
17:20 And then, afterwards, the beekeepers basically go,
17:23 "Oh, well, we're not involved anymore. We're washing our hands of this."
17:27 It's like if the Continental existed in John Wick,
17:30 and they sent one assassin after him, and they basically gave up after that.
17:34 That's what this is.
17:35 And to me, it's frustrating because Statham can clearly still do the action stuff.
17:39 He's throwing himself into the set pieces,
17:41 but they're not giving him that much interesting to do
17:44 until near the end of the movie,
17:46 when the beekeeper finally goes against a worthy opponent in the form of Taylor James' Lazarus,
17:51 a crazy South African mercenary,
17:54 because I guess we run through all the other henchmen stereotypes by that point.
17:58 But the climax of the movie, action-wise, is a fight scene between these two characters.
18:04 And actually, it's the best action scene in the entire movie,
18:08 largely because it's a really rough knockdown battle between these two characters.
18:14 And Clay actually gets hurt.
18:16 He gets hurt a lot in it.
18:17 They really mess each other up over the course of this sequence,
18:21 as they throw each other into these glass mirrored walls and things like that,
18:26 and they stab each other.
18:28 It's really brutal and vicious and very close quarters.
18:33 And I was watching this going, "This is a great fight scene.
18:36 Why the hell wasn't the rest of the movie like this?"
18:40 The Beekeeper's a pretty bad movie, but it's an enjoyable one.
18:44 It is absolutely preposterous,
18:46 but it delivers itself with such a po-face seriousness that it starts to feel like a throwback.
18:51 It starts to feel like a one-man army movie
18:54 that might have been headlined by Chuck Norris or Steven Seagal back in the day
18:58 and made by Canon.
18:59 And it's quite slickly directed by Ea.
19:03 I just wish that, as an action fan, there was a bit more variation with the action.
19:07 But luckily, the goofy plossing always draws you back in,
19:12 because there's always some absurd next twist right around the corner.
19:18 And so I'd be happy to see Statham come back for more outings as the Beekeeper
19:23 so long as they don't become self-aware.
19:26 Near the end of the movie, a character actually says to Clay, "You're only human."
19:32 And there was a part of me that wished that he replied, "No, I'm a bee."
19:37 But maybe he shouldn't have, and that was the right call.
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20:27 Until next time, I'm Matthew Buck, fading out.
20:31 [outro music]