See what I get up to when I'm around Alex? He claimed this movie was worse than Breach, which seemed impossible (and upon rewatch he couldn't figure out how he came to such a conclusion,) so we watched it after Bad Boys: We're Getting Old.
Adam (Jason Statham) keeps bees on this nice retired teacher's (Phylicia Rashad) farm. After some guys scam her into giving up access to all her financial accounts and drain them, including the charity she looked after, she kills herself. Her daughter Verona (Emmy Raver-Lampman) is an FBI agent, who doesn't hold much hope of finding the ones responsible.
But wait, Adam has mysterious contacts, so he finds the call center and burns it to the ground. The call center is part of a series of such places, owned by some obnoxious trust fund shithead (Josh Hutcherson) who has the former head of the CIA (Jeremy Irons) running security for him as a favor to his mother. Ominous foreshadowing! Irons eventually figures out what Statham was before he kept bees, and at that point, the end is inevitable. Much like the first John Wick, it's just a matter of how many lives are going to be wasted trying to protect the shithead. Frankly, one would have been too many, but Statham kills, wounds or maims a lot more than that.
Statham can play roles that poke fun at his usual (only?) character, but this is not one of those. At least, not intentionally. He might have taken it to the point of parody without meaning to, I'm not sure. Adam's a man of few words, most of those words about bees. Blunt and to the point. When he arrives at the call center, he tells the security guards he's going to burn it down. When the guard tells him to leave and threatens to count to 3, Adam does it for him (though he doesn't immediately move into beating the guy's ass, which seemed like a miss.) When Verona at one point reminds him they have laws, I felt no particular pride in predicting Adam's response - 'And when those laws fail, then you have me' - because, honestly, what else was he going to say?
I guess you could see it as restraint, that Adam knows what he's capable of, so he puts his focus and energy into tending beehives, avoiding any more interaction with people than necessary to minimize the chance he resumes his old work. There could have been something there to contrast with his successor, who is a maniac. She rams his car in the middle of a gas station, and when the fight turns against her, reveals she had a minigun set up in the bed of her truck. A love of overkill, versus a quiet, if showy, efficiency.
Sadly, they killed her two minutes after she appeared. No time for any musing on the kind of people one might assign such a role, or the mental toll it takes, Jason Statham's got more call center creeps to terrorize! Which, you know, that's fine. If I could sic a guy like this on the people responsible for those spam calls urgently requesting I call a bank I've never had an account with, I absolutely would. Hutcherson plays a great conceited, spoiled brat, divorced from any concept of empathy or that there are consequences for his actions. The middleman Adam finds first is a conniving sleazebag, gleefully tricking people out of their money and doing little dances in his ugly suit afterward.
So with Statham being grimly determined, Irons wearily resigned to his futile and unpleasant task, the villains not so much unrepentant as unable to see there's anything to repent for, any emotional heft falls to Raver-Lampman's character. She grieves over her mother, but there's an air of resentment to it, as it seems like Verona's deceased brother was the apple of mom's eye. Like she wants to prove something to a mother she felt didn't appreciate her. Verona wants to bring down the people who scammed her mother, even comes in on her day off to work on the case, but also doggedly chases Adam's string of fires and murders. Caught between following the law and following her own sense of what's just.
I don't think the movie really gives it the time or depth for a proper showing - the movie knows its bread is buttered with Statham kicking ass - but I think Raver-Lampman brings a level of conflict to her performance where you can wonder if she's really trying to stop Adam, or just wants to make sure she's close enough to see him finish it.
5 comments:
I don't mind most Jason Statham films; if you don't take them seriously, they're sometimes a fun way to spend an hour or so. The first Meg was enjoyable, the second not so much, and for me, Beekeeper fell somewhere in between.
More info about the organisation he left (and his nutty replacement, as you say) would have been good. Maybe they're saving that in the hopes there would be a sequel?
There are a couple of films that suggest that Statham is capable of more than, well, Being Jason Statham, but he does just keep doing the same thing over and over again, the only difference being whether he's British Jason Statham in this film, or if he's "American" Jason Statham.
I can't tell whether he enjoys doing that same thing, he just can't do anything else (the couple of counter examples being flukes), it pays ridiculously well, or some combination of all three.
I do wonder if in ten years or so we'll see one of those late career pivots into another genre and he'll walk off with an Oscar.
Only having seen bits of Meg, and none of the sequel, I wouldn't put this with Crank, or Spy, but definitely ahead of some of the other ones I've seen.
And I sure hope they aren't thinking sequel, but you're probably right that they are. Trying to clone the John Wick franchise.
I imagine it's pretty easy money to just keep playing the same guy. I feel like they did a feature on him in, Esquire, GQ, something, the mag had him on the cover, scowling and holding a melted ice cream cone, where he mentioned just wanting to keep busy. So maybe he jumps on whatever project comes across his desk?
I can't picture him winning an Oscar, but I feel like he might surprise me with his range in a comedy.
Yeah, the standard path for the action stars is into comedy, but he has done a touch of that and he wasn't great. But those were more action-comedy, and maybe he could thrive in more outright comedy. Maybe.
Dramatic Oscar-baiting roles are where the comedians like Steve Carell and Robin Williams tend to go, so it's unlikely we'd see Statham going that way, but even so I think I'd only be half-surprised by it. Or seeing him pop up at the Royal Shakespeare Company doing Hamlet or something.
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