Do you feel like you have been seeing Jason Statham (“The Meg”) quite a bit lately? It is because you have. “The Beekeeper” is his fifth movie in the past year. “Operation Fortune,” “Fast X,” “Meg 2: The Trench,” “Expendables 4,” and now his latest, “The Beekeeper.”
He is nearing overexposure in the same way I feel about Taylor Swift. No one can touch her though. Oh boy I am going to suffer some flak revealing that one! I mean he is 56, so he is probably looking to bank as much money as possible into that 401K before he gets thrown out to pasture. I can’t say I blame the dude. Just like the old saying goes, one must strike while the iron is hot! And he is pretty “hot” for someone only a few short years away from 60.
“The Beekeeper” is exactly what you expect it to be. Nothing better, nothing worse, and zero pretense. It is a plain old down home action thriller to please the fellas. It is filled with fighting, gunshots, blood, and an overload of in-your-face hair-raising violence. In this feature, Jason plays Adam Clay, a man who is enjoying his solitude as a private beekeeper on a small parcel of land, owned by an older woman whom he has taken under his protective wing. When a slimy group of frauds come into the picture to disrupt Adam’s balance, all hell breaks loose. I am feeling about Jason Statham now the same way I feel about Tom Cruise and Liam Neeson. I would like to see all of them slow their roll just a touch and star in a simple drama. But hey, they are delivering us the goods and I suppose the audience has spoken, otherwise there would not be a market for this style of film.
Surprisingly, “The Beekeeper” turned out to be a more solid film than it could have ended up. It never lagged, and it made your want to root the good guy. There were oodles of slime balls involved in the underbelly of the story that you just couldn’t wait to get stomped out, literally. “The Beekeeper” certainly doesn’t reinvent the wheel here and may not be a true standout in its genre, but so what?
Speaking of bees, everytime I look in the mirror, I think of the flying pests, as my nose looks like it was stung a few times and swelled up. But, what can I do, just like Lady Gaga states, I was “Born this way.” So go pop some popcorn, sip some sugary soda pop, and stand up and cheer for some kick-ass no-holds-barred American bloodshed.