The Beekeeper

 The first interchange in The Beekeeper goes something like this:

EXT. FARM - DAY

THE BEEKEEPER

Thanks for hiring and taking care of me, lovely old lady. You are like a mother figure to me.

ELOISE

That is fine, The Beekeper - you are awesome and a good person. You are also like a son figure to me.

 (I'm removing some extraneous phrasing and exposition, but that really is how it comes off.)

 Once The Beekeper (Jason Statham) retires home after that quaint exchange, Eloise, the lovely old lady (Phylicia Rashad), logs onto her laptop and gets swept up in one of those "your computer has been infected, call this number" scams. The result: all her accounts are immediately emptied, including a charity account to the tune of two million dollars. Once she realizes it, she grabs a gun and shoots herself.

 Let's gloss over the fact that the scammers aren't some grifters out to try and infect random vulnerable targets with ransomware or whatever, but a highly organized bunch of douchebags operating out of a modern, high-tech call center and running a complex operation; That's actually a plot point (a dumb, dumb plot point, like all the other plot points in the movie).

 I don't mind dumb in my action movies. I don't mind crass, either - Up to a point, which this movie surpasses a couple minutes in and never looks back. It's also lazy and manipulative, which I have much less tolerance for. The movie is nothing if not relentlessly populist, dumb, crass, lazy and manipulative. Knowingly so - but while that cuts it some slack, it's no excuse for writing this shitty.

 The floor manager that takes Eloise's call, for example, makes a show out of swindling her out of her life savings, revels in the fact that he's emptying out a charity account, makes nasty asides, and basically twirls his moustache for five full fucking minutes. And then, of course, there's the fact that this lovely old lady's first response to having her bank accounts emptied is blowing her fucking brains out with a gun. There's crass, and then there's this.

 As we know from the trailers, The Beekeeper isn't just a beekeeper, but a Beekeeper, a super agent for  a secret, above-the-law organization that does something or another - John Wick shit, but even less sensical and for the government. Even though he's retired, as soon as his mother figure gets fridged, our Beekeeper quickly finds out where the scammers are based, beats up the guards and blows up the building. Here's a fun fact: He lets everyone go, but leaves four people to burn - presumably the security guards, who are technically the ones who were innocent of the crime he's out to avenge. This fucking script.

 The bombing attracts the attention of a couple of FBI agents (Bobby Naderi and Emmy Raver-Lampman - one of which is Elouise's daughter, because it's that sort of script), and they start following The Beekeeper. While likeable, they are completely and utterly superfluous; A whole lot of time is wasted on them. The main meat of the movie is the war that develops between The Beekeper and the shady corporation controlling the scammers, a conspiracy that quickly spirals out to involve mobsters, mercenaries, government operatives and even a rival Beekeeper (she's batshit crazy and happily starts shooting up innocents; Also, she's completely incompetent. I really have to question the wisdom of a program that gives these asshats this level of power and weaponry.)

 It all is fairly pleasingly over-the-top, and The Beekeper's revenge does go further than I'd have expected. I'd respect it more if Black Dynamite hadn't done something similar before (spoilers?). To be honest, I find the idea of Nixon wielding a nunchaku much more believable than some of the shit this film gets up to.

 The action is pretty decent - short, brutal choreographies which Stratham pulls off with aplomb. It's not up to the standards we've been accustomed to by other recent movies, but it's fun enough. There's no tension - the bad guys are so outclassed there's never any doubt how things are going to end, but that's pretty common in action cinema. No, the problem here is that a script this bad, so full of cringe-worthy dialog and ideas, really needs a whole lot more action to redeem the movie; As it stands, the bullshit:awesome ratio is heavily skewed in the wrong direction.

 There's a dearth of good characters. Beginning with Statham; I normally enjoy his wooden, somewhere between angry and confused-looking charisma, but here he plays a sanctimonious prick who makes the same fucking terrible bee-based puns over and over again, like a piss-poor Batman villain from the '60s show*. And he keeps killing policemen, soldiers and secret service while letting the assholes he should be punishing live! Screw that guy. Jeremy Irons plays the head of the CIA and he's fun and all, but his role is basically to act scared of big bad Statham; The villains don't make much of an impression due to how shallowly over-the-top their performative assholishness is.

 There are some scripts - like the ones that, say Colin Trevorrow squeezes out every few years - that you have to figure are written with crayons on large scraps of coloured cardboard, dick doodles covering the margins. Beekeeper scriptwriter Kurt Wimmer is above that level, if only by a little; He made his name with Equilibrium, after all, a movie with a plot that could generously be described as "Baby's first dystopia (but for really dumb babies)". It had Christian Bale, though, and some interesting/cool Matrix-derived action, so we all gave it a pass.

 I don't want to be too mean to Kurt Wimmer - I did kind of enjoy Law Abiding Citizen, if nothing else. But his script for The Beekeeper is possibly the dumbest fucking thing I've seen in a very long time; If the scripts for the Jurassic Worlds were written with crayons, this one was produced by Mr. Wimmer dipping his balls in tempera and then bending over and rubbing them all over the wall.

 And yet, and yet... I don't hate this movie. Not the same way I hated other deeply dumb and crass movies like the aforementioned Jurassic Worlds, or even the latter Mission Impossibles or Fast and Furiouses. I'm not giving The Beekeeper's shit a pass, mind, but I did make it to the end, and was mildly entertained despite all of the eye rolling.

 Yes, the fact that it does know how stupid it is does play a part, as is its willingness to push things to ridiculous lengths. There's also the fact that there's a sense that everyone is in on the joke, and still decide to play things straight, which is appreciated. Director David Ayer has long been a purveyor of dumb, loud, lad's movies, and his commitment to treating this as if it was Shakespeare goes a long way. There's no excuse for how much time it wastes, but it's still over in a relatively lean 105 minutes.

 I fully stand behind all the verbiage I've written excoriating this movie (for the record: over a thousand one hundred words**), and I could probably think of a lot more to say against it; It really does have one of the worst scripts I've seen in a long time, and richly deserves an MST3K treatment. There's no question in my mind that it's kind of terrible. But... it's the good kind of terrible. As long as I'm never forced to watch it again, I'm kind of OK with it.

*: Even this aspect is half-arsed. They keep re-using the same shitty lines about "protecting the hive", and even squeeze in a lame Bee or not to bee pun. Sadly, Stratham never clenches a knife between his buttcheeks and uses is to stab people - maybe they're saving that for a sequel.

**: That's a little more than 25% of the usual amount of poorly chosen words I need to collect my lame thoughts on the random no-budget horror/action/martial arts movie that inspires me to go in-depth. If you're reading this: You're either a saint, or a masochist. Thank you either way.