Flasz On Film

In a world where not one, not two, not three but four films whose titles begin with the words “John” and “Wick” exist, not to mention spinoffs in production and an ill-fated TV series, all of which collectively totaling well over a billion dollars in box office revenue, it is just a simple fact of life that other pitches will pop up like mushrooms on a damp Tuesday morning and that some of those pitches will turn into movies… and that those movies will immediately be perceived as lesser knockoff works aimed at audiences that don’t exist. After all, who would want to watch an ersatz John Wick made for Amazon Prime when you can rewatch the real thing?  

That is assuming you are able to vibe with John Wick a bit better than I do. And even in this case, you’d probably have a slightly classier alternative to go for in the form of The Equalizer trilogy. But that’s neither here nor there.  

What matters is the fact that a movie like the David Ayer-directed The Beekeeper is likely to attract ire from all fronts on the back of the simple fact it is trying to capitalize on the cultural wave created by Keanu Reeves’s slick assassin who decided he was back after hearing people ask if he was back. And there is no way of telling whether the genesis of the movie lies within the aftermath of the completely unexpected John Wick craze that somehow captured the minds of modern-day seekers of cinematic entertainment ambulated by a video game aesthetic, iconography and world-building. So, if you’d like to be a cynical git, you may react to the idea of a movie about a retired killing machine superspy who springs back into action in the wake of a triggering traumatic event with nothing more than a shoulder shrug, because you will quickly pigeonhole whatever the movie is as an attempt at knocking off a successful action franchise with nothing more than a flimsy idea, a B-tier has-been action star more suited for another stint as one of the Expendables, and a desire to earn some box office change before letting it disappear in the abyss of streaming libraries and seeing its rights ping-ponged between all the big market players on a rolling six-month basis. 

And your assessment probably wouldn’t be wrong either because whichever angle you assume, The Beekeeper just looks like John Wick from Alibaba. It’s built on the same premise, uses similar stakes and deploys Johnwickian techniques of filming action scenes, which is kind of what happened to the action genre in the aftermath of The Bourne Identity and its sequels. It’s inescapable to a degree. Jason Statham plays a suitably non-verbal self-diagnosed hermit, but to make it fresh, the filmmakers give him bees to keep. Almost as though to fit the title. However, that’s not even the half of it because the titular beekeeping Jason Statham is a retired supersoldier who used to work in The Beekeeper program, which indicates that he somehow adopted a few tenets of his job, or at least of the metaphorical nomenclature used by the CIA to describe it, as parts of his personality. So, he… keeps bees. He makes honey. And he just lives peacefully on a farm in the middle of nowhere, pacified by the ins and outs of his day-to-day beekeeping life.  

However, things change drastically one day because his host (played by Phylicia Rashad), who also happens to be an elderly woman, falls victim to an online scam perpetrated by villains who clearly watched to many Joel Schumacher movies from the 90s, and loses not only all her life savings, but also funds of a charity she was managing. Naturally, she blows her brains out immediately and this is what sends Jason Statham into a vengeful frenzy. The movie goes from there in a very predictable direction because the scamming outfit is only a small cog in a bigger business and that business is run by Josh Hutcherson, who is the kind of cliche Zoomer-or-latter-Millennial CEO who rides skateboards in the office and does literally anything but real work. And that’s not even the end of it because somehow Jeremy Irons – Hutcherson’s chief of security, I believe – gets entangled in this thing and he’s the kind of a businessman who wears a full-on tennis outfit to work. Naturally, the entire intrigue leads to the highest echelons of power in the country (which is where you are free to make connections to the Hunter Biden affair, if QAnon and rightwing conspiracies are your jam) and – trailing it all with her trusty sidekick – the nice old lady’s daughter (Emmy Raver-Lampman) who also happens to be an FBI agent becomes a part of the story. And Minnie Driver plays the director of CIA who sends another Beekeeper to take out that rogue Statham Beekeeper. And eventually we even witness a South African assassin. Do you see now how much of a mess this movie is?  

Or… is it? 

Being completely honest, if you watch this movie expecting anything serious, you might as well check out and go home because it’s not it. In fact, it is probably detrimental to even acknowledge that it may have been inspired by the success of John Wick. Therefore, do me a favour and forget that John Wick exists for a second because even if you view The Beekeeper as a low-rent ersatz thereof, it won’t do this movie any favours. Instead, I suggest you give it the benefit of the doubt and agree that it looks past John Wick into a small subsection of the well of inspiration Stahelski and company tapped into when putting their movie together.  

But don’t look at the samurai stuff and the video games. That’s not that kind of movie either.  

The Beekeeper is best enjoyed as a modern take of what a Chuck Norris movie would look like if Chuck Norris movies were popular now. Which they aren’t. It’s a strange confluence of Ayer’s gawdy and glitzy post-Suicide Squad iconography applied to telling a story of the similar ilk to movies like Invasion USA. Statham is appropriately non-verbal and dangerously corny in his stoic demeanour, the villains – as I said – are just a notch down from Tommy Lee Jones in Batman Forever and Fisher Stevens in Hackers and the entire story, if you forget that the revenge narrative has now been claimed in full by means of squatters’ rights by John Wick, is something you’d imagine Steven Seagal or Michael Dudikoff would be interested in at a time when their brands were doing well on Blockbuster shelves.  

It’s not cinema. It’s trash. But it’s trash of a vintage I can watch all day.  

And if I’m going to make some enemies while I’m here, I might as well throw you a curveball and say that thanks to the absolutely haphazardly put together set of substories involving Emmy Raver-Lampman (the old lady’s FBI agent daughter), a political conspiracy and some kind of mythology-building, The Beekeeper has just about enough breadth to feel like a piece of schlock that takes place in some kind of recognizable reality… that is until we enter the business premises owned by Josh Hutcherson, which are taken out of 90s comic book movies. Nevertheless, Ayer’s movie as a whole – and I say this with the confidence of someone who responds extremely well to Ayer’s brand of grit-meets-over-the-topness – sets the Johnwickian snooty edgelordism of a post-Matrix uber-serious tantric exaltation to one side (at least for the most part) and opts to just have fun at all costs. 

Thus, Statham, while brooding and unrelenting, is still entrenched in a thoroughly heightened world full of goofy backup singers. Which is what my tastebuds enjoy – a thoroughly contrived experience that is as jazzy and glitzy and shouty and stupid as it is seriously violent and gruesome. The Beekeeper is just a totally unpretentious attempt at drawing from the same narrative well that John Wick did, or better yet, an imagined experience in which David Ayer once again attempts to make a direct-to-video 90s movie and simply succeeds. That is as long you honour your side of the deal and agree not to expect this movie to exhibit any form of highfalutin ambition you ought to demand from an A-tier production with franchise aspirations. It’s not the same ball game. However, at this point I am willing to bet a considerable amount of money that The Beekeeper 2 will make landfall within the next two years and become a franchise, too. It’s just meant to be because a property as corny and earnestly self-aware as this one simply begs to be followed up with even more ridiculous antics.  

Until then, I’ll be here. Waiting patiently. Minding Jason Statham’s bees. Maybe you will join me too, especially if you are also tired of post-Wachowski self-seriousness and you never say no to a solid helping of genre kitsch straight from the mind of a guy who just understands the video store vibes, has access to cameras and knows what makes guys like Yours Truly giggle with enjoyment.