[Movie] The Beekeeper- My Honest Review

I'll say I came in with very little interest and this could arguably be the way to view it. It's easy, it's close to soap opera, sweet old lady Eloise Parker, whose home serves as a charity, falls victim to a phishing scam and ends up losing more than two million dollars.. not her own money, but her charity's. She is so heartbroken and guilty about her loss that she commits suicide. Her tenant, a quiet and unassuming guy, who lives in her garage and keeps bees, is actually beekeeper Adam Clay, who is an operative for a shadowy black-ops organization that quite literally calls itself ‘Beekeepers'. But when it becomes clear that Eloise has died, Adam decides he's going to bust the whole thing up, starting with Eloise's broken arm.

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The film then becomes a roll call of "guy climbs his way up a criminal ladder" films that one has already seen before, and Statham has made a career out of this character at this point. What's cool is how casually he goes up the ante. He begins by setting a literal call center full of scammers ablaze and then he just keeps moving up the ladder from there, and by the end of the film the stakes have become quite high, indeed, a matter of national security. It goes quickly.. almost too quickly.. and it doesn't really give any time for anything to breathe in the plot. Then you are confronted with the small-time scam artists, and moments after the big-time government conspiracy is within the realm of possibility. Tonally and narratively it is a big jump and kept me entertained but it did leave me a little whiplashed.

The Good:
Once again, the best part of this film is Statham. Nothing new here, that's in his self-righteous, secretly terrifying wheelhouse, but he's magnetic in the part, and the fighting choreography is pretty good. The way he does the action is brutal, but not gratuitously over-edited, as if you were going to put a camera in your asshole. Also making the appearance is Jeremy Irons, and he brings a gravitas to every scene he's in, even in a limited amount of time in this movie, which needs the gravitas at times when it's quieter and more exposition-heavy.

I would also like to pay respects to the movie's own humor. The bee references and beekeeping jargon is so dense it's almost a caricature; the beekeeper trying to protect the hive and other beekeeping terms as a way to say whatever other organization jargon.. and it was a little too much at first but by the end I think it was supposed to be. Not a film that seeks to be The Departed. It knows that it is a vehicle to deliver Statham breaking bones, and that it's a ridiculously stupid premise that it's not pretending to be prestige cinema, so it's just being it.

The Not-So-Good:
The pacing really is an issue. Nothing has space to have its own stakes... that is, character motivations get trampled by the momentum of the plot; by the time that the "big reveal" of who's really behind all this arrives, it doesn't have the impact that it should because we haven't been spending enough time with any of it. A handful of supporting characters also have some problems.. a couple of scenes are awkward or awkwardly acted, enough to occasionally get my attention away from other scenes that I'd expected to be more intense. And the story itself is, structurally, a budget version of “budget John Wick”, the revenge-fueled and bloody climax of increasingly more powerful villains, but without the world-building that made John Wick's universe so compelling.

My Final Thoughts
It's not a good film, realistically speaking... the script is fluffy, the pace is frantic, and it has nothing to say about revenge, corporate greed or internet fraud (albeit it hints at each of them). It's a really fun one, though. I never once checked the time, I laughed at some of the wackier bee puns, and the action scenes are actually shot and are satisfying. It is a film that is perfect for an evening when you want to watch something loud, stupid and fun... not expecting much from it.

My overall rating: 6/10.... Simply switch off your brain, and make the most of the madding crowd..

_{(other Images are screenshots from my movie players)}

Rating: 60/100

Originally posted through scrobble.life/movies.