Ryan S Rogers

Not every movie is for every person, but I don't know who this is for.

I wanted to not spend the whole time comparing The Beekeeper to John Wick, but it's very clear they are trying to do something similar. Jason Statham is a retired killer, brought back into action by a cocky rick boy whose dad (or dad stand-in in this case) is familiar with the killer, and pulls out all the stops to try and put an end to him, but can't. Same formula, wildly different results.

The Beekeeper desperately wants you to believe it’s universe, but it doesn’t make much sense, and not in the fun way that a dumb movie can not make sense but it's cool so you go with it. This one doesn't make sense in the normal, bad way.

It's also a joyless movie. There's no real revelry in the fun of it all. It's playing everything extremely straight, which only helps call attention to how ridiculous it is. When everything is so un-fun, it becomes a lot harder to overlook certain things that are just not logically consistent with it's own universe. At a certain point, they have to call in the current beekeeper to fight Statham's retired beekeeper. Beekeepers are meant to be the absolute cream of the crop, the best operatives that have ever existed. What we got was a weird lady with blue hair and a loud standout style that is no where close to effective. It also felt like they needed the villain to be liberal coded for this right wing fantasy nonsense to work.

Everyone plays their roles pretty well. Jason Statham is just Jason Statham. Josh Hutcherson is believable as this horrible rich kid. Jeremy Irons is doing the best he can with what he has. But in the end, the writing and direction for the movie just sink it so fast.

The fight scenes in the movie are, by and large, pretty bland and boring as well with a couple of exception. Those brief exceptions are the only good points in the movie, and (just barely) enough to make me give this a 2/10 instead of a 1/10.