BEFORE: Jason Statham carries over again from "Meg 2: The Trench" and before this Labor Day week is over, I'll have seen him working at a variety of professions, which I guess makes him the "working man's" action hero. He was an underground fight club promoter in "13", a mercenary in "Expend4bles", then a deep-sea diving expert in "The Meg", and tonight he's a beekeeper. Yet somehow he's always sort of playing the same guy, right? What other professions will he be this week? HINT: There are at least two more coming, I can't resist dropping in the film he may be MOST famous for, even though watching that film (and its sequel) is really going to take two more slots away from November or December. Sorry, I can't pass up this linking opporunity, because who knows if I'll be able to circle back his way again or not? I probably can, but it could be two years, I can't take the chance.
Now here are the planned actor links for September, after Statham: Tony Goldwyn, Joey Slotnick, Colman Domingo, Echo Kellum, Rachel McAdams, Anton Lesser, Jay Courtney, Shailene Woodley, Naomi Watts, Denis O'Hare, Anna Kendrick, Kunal Nayyar, Adam Sandler, Cecily Strong, Gary Cole, John Cena, Awkwafina, Keegan-Michael Key, Charlie Day, and Steve Coulter. This should hold up and get me to October 1, unless I made a mistake or I change my mind. Either is possible. I now estimate that I'll have 17 or 18 slots available for November and December, I'm just going to have to make it work, and find another way to kill time in the later part of the year.
THE PLOT: A kind-hearted landlady commits suicide after falling victim to a phishing scam, leading former "Beekeeper" operative Adam Clay to set out on a brutal campaign for revenge upon those responsible.
AFTER: This film from just last year kind of proves that nearly every "vigilante" action film from the last few years basically follows the same formula - where the hero starts small and works his way up the criminal chain to the top level, which I suspect just isn't how law enforcement really works in the real world, and also, if you want to be a vigilante, you have to learn that style of fighting (or MMA, whatever) where one guy can take on ten guys at a time, grabbing the gun hand of one and using it to shoot three other guys while also doing a knock-out kick on a fourth guy and then tossing the guy who was holding the gun into a wall or flipping him over his back or something. Look, I don't know if it's MMA or Krav Maga or just Hollywood stunt-movie technique, but it always LOOKS really cool, and again, I don't think anybody really fights like this in the real world. I know if I had to go up against ten guys in a fight, I've really lost that fight before it even begins - so it's better for me to just live my life in a way that ensures that situation never ever comes to pass.
But we all wish we could do this in the real world, right? Somebody calls our mother or father or grandfather and pretends to be from the company that wants to update their computer software or retrieve their lost data or just report that someone might be trying to access their bank account, so all they need to do is allow them to take over their laptop screen for a few minutes to install the software, then sign on to their bank account to check to see if they received the refund for the accidental overcharge, and the next thing you know, that account is cleared out, bye-bye savings and checking AND the retirement fund. Phishing scams are real, and they happen every day, and there's almost no way to track down where the company is or who's in charge of them, but we know somebody's getting rich off the naiveté of the senior citizens. We wish we could go down to their offices with a couple cans of gasoline and torch the place, even if that doesn't get our parents back the money they were scammed out of, it would prevent anyone else from losing their accounts.
It's really wish fulfillment here, because chances are that if this happened to you or your parents, even if you did find out what company was reponsible, they could be located (physically or not) in someplace like Dubai or the Cayman Islands and really, you'd have no recourse except to be smarter in the future about what information you give out on the phone to the very helpful people trying to help you. Some lessons have to be learned the hard way, maybe.
Adam Clay is just a guy who keeps bees, a quiet man, mostly keeps to himself, except when there's a nest of hornets in his landlord's barn that's interfering with his hive's honey production. Side note, whatever happened to those "murder hornets", are they still around? For that matter, what happened to "killer bees"? We were told like back in the 1980's that they were coming up from Mexico, I guess they're coming really slowly, or they fell in love with other bees in Texas and settled down or something.
The hornets and bees thing is just practical beekeeping stuff, except it's also a metaphor for taking down the evil things that are messing with society, and destroying whatever they touch. And the beekeeper is just a beekeeper, except he's also a "Beekeeper", which is code for a specially-trained agent who is not only an expert in combat techniques and martial-arts but also is single-minded enough to work his way up through the hive structure of a criminal organization and not stop until he reaches the top. Which in this case, is the Queen Bee herself, no spoilers here, but let's just say that the guy behind the phishing scam is very well connected, and this film is perhaps very relevant just because it is an Election Year. Maybe I said too much.
The CIA is aware of the Beekeeper program, it may even be one of their own, so once this retired Beekeeper has made himself known by cliimbing up the internet criminal chain, they have to send a second Beekeeper (who is probably not also a real beekeeper) to take out the retired one who's gone rogue. But that doesn't really work, because she's somehow not as good as him? I guess maybe that fight could have gone either way, but you know the kids today, the Gen Z kids are total slackers compared to the Gen X'ers. Which generation would win in a fight? I think we know, because the Gen Z kids wouldn't be able to stop looking at their phones and posting on Instagram. Gen X is focused, man, at least by comparison.
This film was a surprise hit in January of this year, after the studios accidentally didn't schedule any other action movies in that month - it grossed more than three times its budget, so don't be surprised if "Beekeeper 2" is in the works.
Also starring Emmy Raver-Lampman (last seen in "Dog"), Bobby Naderi (last seen in "Bright"), Josh Hutcherson (last seen in "The Disaster Artist"), Jeremy Irons (last seen in "Beautiful Creatures"), David Witts, Michael Epp (last seen in "Overlord"), Taylor James (last seen in "Artemis Fowl"), Phylicia Rashad (last seen in "Being Mary Tyler Moore"), Jemma Redgrave (last seen in "Howards End"), Minnie Driver (last seen in "Beautiful"), Don Gilet, Sophia Feliciano, Enzo Cilenti (last seen in "Heart of Stone"), Megan Le, Dan Li, Georgia Goodman (last seen in "Uncharted"), Derek Siow (last seen in "All the Old Knives"), Jay Rincon (last seen in "Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom"), Kojo Attah, Joe Urquhart, Peter Brooke (last seen in "The Gunman"), Martin Gordon, Rebecca Hazlewood (last seen in "Equals"), Arian Nik, Millen Brown, Reza Djako (last seen in "The Son"), Baba Oyejide, Valentina Novakovic, Kojo Quainco, Jessica Maria Gilhooley,
RATING: 6 out of 10 jackets clearly marked "Secret Service" in big white letters (umm, then it's not really so secret, is it?)
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