THB #470: The Beekeeper
Tired of all the Oscar talk? Well, this is a movie you don’t have to worry about getting Oscar buzz, now or ever. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a great time at the movies.
You could be going to Oppenheimer (back in IMAX) or Poor Things or American Fiction or The Color Purple or The Holdovers or Killers of the Flower Moon or Saltburn or even 13 sceens playing Barbie this weekend. But the movie you are most likely to see in a theater is The Beekeeper.
Weirdest freakin’ action movie I think I have ever seen.
The movie stars Jason Statham, has Jeremy Irons in a small role that isn’t quite what it seems in the ads, Josh Hutcherson in a sleazy little bad guy turn, Minnie Driver in a cameo, and Phylicia Rashad for a few minutes as (not) Claire Huxtable, living a good, quiet life after Cliff was sent to prison for being a molester.
But basically, the only role that eats up real time in the film with a star in it is Statham.
The female lead is Emmy Raver-Lampman. She is fine, but she isn’t Sandy Bullock in Demolition Man and The Umbrella Academy doesn’t make you a movie star. Her FBI partner is Bobby Naderi… who is fine, but who is he? Michael Epp (not Mike Epps), Taylor James, David Witts… maybe they will all become stars. But these are the actors we spend the most time with and none of them are remotely familiar to me. They have enough credits that someone might know them all from somewhere… and again, it’s not that they are bad. But they are the cast of an ultra-low-budget kind of movie where they can’t afford to hire name actors - even at the B or C level - who audiences might expect.
I got it with Statham’s The Meg 2, where the clear focus is on Asian talent and giant CG animals that eat entire piers in a bite. But The Beekeeper is the classic action format of a story that motivates a lone, super-skillful killer good guy to have a series of confrontations that are really, really cool. (Or as SCTV would have it, “they blow up real good!”)
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