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The Beekeeper (2024)

 

The Beekeeper is an action movie released in the dumping ground for movies. 

David Ayer has a good amount of movies under his belt and the production of this film didn't have the faith to really put any marketing behind it, especially with the risk of using Emmy Raver-Lampman, who overacted her way through Umbrella Academy. Ayer notoriously had issues with production with Suicide Squad and this just cements the fact that Ayer can't carry a film by name alone.

The film had a solid action writer in Kurt Wimmer but the scenes that were supposed to be dialogue-heavy or character-developing were lacking. Wimmer wrote Equilibrium, Expend4bles, the Point Break and Total Recall remakes, and the bizarre Ultraviolet. There is some pretty cringe-worthy dialogue and there are some weird allusions to both Donald Trump and Joe Biden with the son of the president even snorting coke in the white house.

Jason Statham plays the Beekeeper, basically James Bond who lives in America. He plays the same character he plays in all of his movies: tough and very British. Jeremy Irons and  Josh Hutcherson come in to play villains. Irons puts forth more effort than anyone else in the film and I can't think of a film he's phoned in on, while Hutcherson plays a character that I guess Gen Z is supposed to identify with but why they should be identifying with a villain I don't understand. Perhaps this is similar to how movies in the 80s the glorification of cops getting rid of crime.

The film tries to be "written for a modern" audience but fails to entertain. Result: C-


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