January 19 – The 1980s saw many great action titles.
"The Terminator". "Predator". "Order". Of course, the good ran out after a while. Until the mid-1990s they had to settle for boring nicknames like "The Breaker" and "The Specialist".
As our movie of the week shows, I think we're officially out of action titles. I don't know about you, but when I walk into a theater that says The Beekeeper, I don't expect a marathon with car chases and lots of karate fights. .
It's a real shame because this new Jason Statham car hasn't aged as well as it appears in modern photos.
My favorite thing about the entire film is probably the premise. In the 2000s we saw several new vigilante films about children fighting sex trafficking. Then, in the 2010s, criminals turned to opioid trafficking. Well, The Beekeeper has a kind of movie villain I don't think I've ever seen before: twenty-something call center scammers who want to scam seniors out of their online banking passwords.
I guess it was supposed to happen one day. I think this movie is as close as you can get to a movie about Charles Bronson's character declaring solo jihad against phishers.
You don't expect much plot in a movie like this and you get almost all of the main story points within the first 20 minutes.
The owner beekeeper then rents the stable of a friendly retired professor. One day he gets a call from a scammer and, what do you know, he accidentally distributes online memberships for a $2 million charity. I'm not going to go out on a limb and tell you exactly what happened to him, but as our hero spends the next 70 minutes setting tech companies on fire and throwing unscrupulous cryptocurrency traders into watery graves, I think you can fill in all the blanks. . . No problem. I say
There are cases that have happened, but it's a convenient excuse for why Statham was never arrested, even when 80 witnesses saw him elbow the head of an online startup in the esophagus. Apparently, the "Beekeepers" are a highly secret organization that "disappears" without leaving a trace of people who threaten national security.
So what is the Beekeeper to do when a former CIA chief uses illegal surveillance to save the lives of the elderly?
Let's just say this movie has more jokes than actual lines of dialogue. And probably more explosions than that.
You know exactly what you're getting into with a film like this. Perhaps suspecting that all the one-sided kung fu fighting would get boring after a while, the plot hits us with a twist at the end of the third act. Obviously there is no doubt about the final result. Because even with the whole Department of Homeland Security lead, you already know that Statham has a diving suit stashed in a convenient location, leaving the door open for the inevitable parade of well-wishers.
While it doesn't try to do anything new or interesting with the deadly formula, it's a film that has its moments. This is not a film we watch to enlighten us; you're only there for the truck crash and the incident where the Gen Z terrorists get thrown through the glass.
Even when a director aims low, I suppose you have to give him some credit when he succeeds.
I say “The Hive” deserves TWO COCOSHA OUT OF FOUR AND A HALF. Maybe then he can track down all the guys trying to sell you extended warranties on cars you don't even own.