The Beekeeper

Being the first in something is a double-edged sword. Sure, you get the bragging rights of being the trail-blazer, #1, the measuring stick ... but once someone else does it better, the prestige of being #1 is all that remains. Halloween kicked off the slasher trend, but Friday The 13th is the iconic slasher brand. The Atari game Adventure was the foundation for adventure/RPG games are built, but compare it against any of its descendants, and it's borderline unplayable. For modern action movies, that standard was John Wick. The ballet-like violence, one man mowing through a field of redshirts with little to no effort, a simple plot ... John Wick did it splendidly. But then came Nobody and said "what if we actually invested in the characters and gave them purpose and an arc?". John Wick's formula is still good, but Nobody showed how much more could be done with it. How it could tell a story alongside the carnival of carnage. If Nobody threatened the throne, The Beekeeper finishes the fight by going in the opposite direction, The Beekeeper looks at everything that weighs John Wick down and ditches it overboard. John Wick seems to shrug off every iota of damage? Falls off rooves and gets shot and seems invincible? The Beekeeper says "what if he just ... never takes damage?". Jason Statham doesn't get so much as a cut until the final fight. He plows through the bad guys like they were children. There's no more need to suspend disbelief about damage, because The Beekeeper is too good to take damage. John Wick's lore is somehow expansive and empty; the whole world seems to be involved with this assassin's guild, and there's a table, and multiple people at the table, but some people are outside the table ... it's a lot, but it's also ill-defined. The Beekeeper simplifies it all. There's a government black-ops task force called The Beekeepers. Where the law fails, they succeed. The end. John Wick is serious and kind of smug. It wants to take action movies to a new level, to look like art. The Beekeeper does not. It couldn't even spell "art". It is meant, first, foremost, and only, as an adrenaline ride. There is precisely enough plot to move the movie forward and nothing more. There is precisely enough action to keep you excited without wearing you out. There is precisely enough world-building for the elements of the movie to make sense without bogging it down in lore nobody asked for. This movie is calculated down to the decimal point to be a stupid, silly, white-knuckle affair, and anything that doesn't perpetuate that feeling gets gleefully tossed overboard. It has no time for anything else. Most of all, where John Wick is humorless and somewhat exhausting, The Beekeeper is fun. Relentless fun. It is constantly upping the ante on itself. It knows its central premise -- the central premise of all these John Wick clones -- is brain-dead, and it leans into that. The Beekeeper has no intentions of being anything other than an hour and forty-five minutes to turn off your brain and watch someone kick maximum ass, and it wants to do that expeditiously. It doesn't belabor the point at all. It gets in, it gets out, and it does what it needs to while it's there. I'm not saying John Wick is bad. It is quite good. But with every sequel that misses the point of the original's simplicity, and every clone that outdoes the original, John Wick, for me, becomes lesser. The Beekeeper may not please people who loves John Wick's sense of style, but if you're growing just a bit worn out of its sense of pomposity and being overblown, The Beekeeper scales it all back to the base essentials.