James Swift: Swift @ The Movies: 'The Beekeeper' gives you a buzz

Jan. 19—There were a lot of great action movie titles back in the '80s.

"The Terminator." "Predator." "Commando." Of course, after a while they ran out of good ones. By the time the mid-'90s rolled around, they were having to make do with lame monikers like "Eraser" and "The Specialist."

Well, as evident by our movie of the week, I reckon the bucket o' action movie names has officially been depleted. I don't know about you, but when I walk into a movie theater with the words "The Beekeeper" posted on the marquee, I'm not exactly expecting a slam-bang punch-a-thon with car chases and karate battles galore.

Which is a shame, really, because as far as modern-day action pictures go, this new Jason Statham vehicle ain't too shabby.

Probably my favorite thing about the entire movie is the premise. In the 2000s, we had a buncha' neo-vigilante justice flicks about guys fighting sex traffickers. Then in the 2010s, the bad guys turned into opioid dealers. Well, in "The Beekeeper," we've got a type of movie villain I don't think I've ever seen before — 20-something entrepreneurial call center fraudsters who like to trick senior citizens out of the online banking passwords.

I suppose it had to happen eventually. And I guess this movie is about as close as we'll ever get to a movie about Charles Bronson's character from all those "Death Wish" movies declaring a one-man jihad on phishers.

You don't expect a whole lot of plot in a movie like this and you get pretty much all of the key story points out of the way in the first 20 minutes.

So, the eponymous beekeeper rents out a barn from a kindly retired teacher. One day, she gets ringed up by a scammer and what do you know, she accidentally gives away the online logins for a $2 million charity. I won't come out and tell you explicitly what happens to her, but considering our hero spends the next 70 minutes setting tech firms on fire and throwing unscrupulous crypto-currency vendors into watery graves, I think you can fill in all the blanks without me telling you.

There's some backstory going on, but it's just a convenient excuse to explain why Statham never gets caught, even when there's 80 witnesses watching him twist an online start-up CEO's elbow down his own esophagus. Apparently, "The Beekeepers" are some sort of super-secret deep state organization that makes people who threaten national security "disappear" without a trace.

So what's a "Beekeeper" supposed to do when the former head of the CIA is using illegal surveillance tools to con the elderly out of their life savings?

Well, let's just say this movie has more punching sounds than actual lines of dialogue. And probably more explosions than that.

You know exactly what you're getting into with a movie like this. Perhaps suspecting that all of the one-sided kung fu brawls are going to become boring after a while, the script hits us with a plot twist WAY late in the third act. Of course, the end result is never in doubt. Because even when the entire Department of Homeland Security is on his trail, you already know that Statham's got a full deep sea diving suit conveniently stashed away somewhere — thus, leaving the door wide open for an inevitable parade of sequels.

It's a movie that has its moments, although it doesn't really try to do anything new or intriguing with a done to death formula. This isn't the kind of movie you watch to be enlightened — you're just here for the truck collisions and the parts where Gen Z terrorists get dropkicked through plate glass windows.

And even when a filmmaker aims low, I suppose you have to congratulate them to some extent when they succeed.

I suppose "The Beekeeper" is worthy of a solid TWO AND A HALF PIECES OF POPCORN OUT OF FOUR rating. Maybe in the sequel, he can go after all of those guys trying to sell extended warranties to you on cars you don't even own?