The Beekeeper
I should’ve known we were in for a rough time when Jason Statham’s bad-ass one-liner to a villain was about estate planning, but at that moment, I still thought The Beekeeper would be one of those “so bad it’s good” films. But no, it’s just bad. Like mind-numbingly, eye-rollingly bad. Like “How many people starred in this because they needed to pay their mortgage?” bad. There is, of course, the awful dialog, which requires the likes of Jeremy Irons and Minnie Driver to slum it. But there’s also the grim tone that’s not really grim but rather, desperately wants you to think it’s grim and a storyline that requires characters to suddenly know things they couldn’t possibly know in order to keep things moving towards a hollow conclusion. I have a pretty low bar for Jason Statham movies: I just want to see him punch cartoonishly bad guys in the faces and look cool while doing so. I gave The Beekeeper an extra half-star because the bad guys being punched are slimy tech bros but still, it makes you long for the cinematic brilliance of the second Transporter movie.