From the first time I saw him in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, I have been a fan of Jason Statham—he is one of the few action heroes working today who actually believable when seen decimating a roomful of opponents and he has also demonstrated a reasonably droll sense of humor that has been a welcome addition to his over-the-top punchfests. That said, even I will concede that after appearing in no fewer than four of last year’s shittiest movies (Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerrero, Fast X, Meg 2: The Meggening and The Expend4bles), he clearly needs to be a little more discerning in the selection of his material. His latest effort, The Beekeeper, is no classic by any stretch of the imagination but it is at least a move in the right direction. He plays Adam Clay, a seemingly mild-mannered beekeeper who, as it turns out, is a retired member of a clandestine government agency known as—wait for it—The Beekeepers who exist outside the normal chains of command and right the wrongs of society in the most painful ways imaginable. When an elderly friend (Phylicia Rashad) is driven to suicide after falling for a computer scam that drained her bank accounts, he goes back into vengeance mode as he determines to up the chain of command to destroy everyone connected to the crime, including the former head of the CIA (Jeremy Irons), a sleazy tech bro (Josh Hutchinson) and countless hapless minions, while he and others bust out a wide array of bee-related quips.
With its screw-loose basic premise and high levels of carnage, The Beekeeper is akin to the berserk Cannon fodder that Golan & Globus churned out back in the 80s for the likes of Charles Bronson and Chuck Norris and for a while, it does have a certain fenderhead charm to it. Much of this is due to the sheer weirdness of Kurt Wimmer’s screenplay, which at times feels like an action movie Mad Libs filled out after ingesting industrial-strength pot gummies, and the laconic personality—for lack of a better word—that Statham deploys to keep him from coming across as merely another generic ass-kicker. The problem is that at about the halfway point, the film begins to run out of steam as the script starts dialing back the weirdness in order to embrace a conspiracy scenario that leads to a finale that, without spoiling things, seems like a questionable dramatic move at best. Things aren’t helped by the increasingly flat-footed direction from David Ayer—while watching it, I couldn’t help but think how much better it might have been in the hands of Luc Besson, a guy who can expertly stage an action set piece and who has no problem with fully embracing and executing nutball premises. That said, as action potboilers that turn up in multiplexes in the dead of January go, The Beekeeper is a little better than one might reasonably expect and action fans with modest expectations should find it reasonably diverting, if ultimately kind of forgettable.
In the new horror-comedy hybrid Destroy All Neighbors, William Brown (Jonah Ray Rodrigues) is a failed prog-rock musician eking out a living as a much-abused sound engineer while working on his own stuff within the confines of the shabby apartment building where he resides with his long-suffering girlfriend (Kiran Deol). The home situation becomes exponentially worse with the arrival of new neighbor Vlad (Alex Winter buried under tons of makeup), a crude and foul-mouthed foreigner of indeterminate origin who stays up all night blasting EDM at ear-splitting levels. At the end of his rope, William goes over to confront Vlad and, perhaps inevitably, ends up accidentally killing him. After chopping up the body and dumping it without getting caught along the way, William thinks he is home free but, as it turns out, Vlad is not the type who would allow a little thing like death and dismemberment from getting in the way of giving his neighbor a very bad time, leading to additional dead bodies that also demonstrate a distressingly long shelf life.
As you can probably guess, this is a film that is unapologetically crude, noisy, silly and gruesome from start to finish. This is not necessarily a bad thing, I should note—after spending the last couple of months mostly watching well-meaning bits of Oscar bait, the notion of seeing something willing to embrace both the gory and the goofy in equal measure does have an undeniable appeal. However, writer-director Josh Forbes manages to stumble badly in both areas, coming up with a wanna-be cult classic that is so clumsy in its execution that it makes that dreadful Foo Fighters vanity vehicle Studio 666 feel like Evil Dead 2 in comparison. Theoretically, there are funny things to be done about such ideas as annoying neighbors, prog music and severed limbs but Forbes has no evident idea of how to make them—the film as a whole is more likely to inspire migraines than mirth thanks to a shrill tone that makes the likes of Sam Raimi’s bizarro live-action cartoon CrimeWave seem subtle and refined by comparison—and what was clearly meant to be cheerfully nonsensical quickly devolves into absolute tedium. As a gore fest, it is slightly more successful but even that quickly grows tiresome as the blood and guts become repetitive—after a while, it begins to feel like a Fangoria article brought to semi-life, lacking only the fine writing that one normally associates with that magazine. Unless you are the type of moviegoer who either really responds to jokes about bass players or sees 2024 mainly as a way to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Idle Hands, feel free to ignore Destroy All Neighbors without hesitation.
I suppose that I should confess that I have never been the greatest admirer of the original Mean Girls—although it did contain a few cheerfully acerbic bits courtesy of Tina Fey’s screenplay and undeniably funny and charismatic performances from Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams and Amanda Seyfried, it always struck me as little more than a warmed-over take on the kind of high school snark that was deployed to greater effect in the likes of Heathers, Clueless and 10 Things I Hate About You. Obviously, I was in the minority as the film became a cottage industry that would spawn a direct-to-video sequel, a branded toaster strudel and a 2018 Broadway musical adaptation. Now Mean Girls has returned in a new adaptation that brings that musical version to the screen (not that you could have surmised that from the original trailer) and while the narrative is pretty much the same—formerly home-schooled teen Cady (Angourie Rice) delves into the high school scene at last and finds herself falling under the sway of campus queen bee, Regina George (Renee Rapp) and her key followers, Karen (Avantika) and Gretchen (Bebe Wood), before going into social combat with them in ways that threaten to tear the entire school apart—the results prove to be even more indigestible than the aforementioned frozen pastry.
Right from the start, it is obvious that virtually nothing about this new iteration is working for reasons ranging from the inevitable to the inexplicable. The most fundamental problem is the whole concept of reconceptualizing the narrative as a musical in the first place—even if the barrage of songs weren’t the instantly forgettable pop fodder offered up here, there isn’t a single one that adds anything to the proceedings except minutes to the increasingly bloated run time. As for the non-musical aspects of the screenplay, it is also a disappointment because although Fey does toss a few funny new jokes into the mix (mostly in the form of fourth wall-breaking), she seems more interested in shining a spotlight on the reprises of the original film’s most notable bits than in finding a way of reconceptualizing the material for a teen landscape that has grown more fraught and forbidding over the last 20 years outside of some stuff involving smartphones and the Internet that seems more interested in being used to facilitate a Megan Thee Stallion cameo than in making any particularly cogent point. Another major problem is the fact that, with the single exception of Auli’i Cravalho, whose turn as the outsider student who initially befriends Cady, only to be cast aside as she falls deeper in Plasticdom, is the only truly lively element on display, the rest of the cast essentially indulge in cosplay instead of trying to put a new spin on things and cannot help but pale in comparison—even Rapp, who played Regina on Broadway, comes across as curiously muted and lacking the blend of cruelty and charm that Rachel McAdams so memorably gave to the part. For all its flaws, the original Mean Girls had things to say about the treacheries of teen life and did so in reasonably funny fashion. This version, however, is little more than a hollow bit of IP exploitation that is too beholden to its predecessor to ever find its own voice—it is essentially a film made by and for the kind of people who are still trying to make “fetch” happen.