A grade-A Jason Statham B-movie, “The Beekeeper” is a back-to-basics effort from the action star that adds a new variation to his standard character assortment. We’ve seen Statham Character #1, in which he is a “loner with a past who must protect a loved one.” Then there’s Statham Character #2 which is the “loner with a past who must protect a youthful innocent.” And now we have Statham Character #3, a “loner with a past who avenges the death of ‘the only person who ever took care of me.’”
When we first meet Adam Clay (Statham), his neighbor, the kindly Mrs. Parker (Phylicia Rashad), invites him over for dinner. Later in the evening, he returns with a jar of the liquid gold produced by the bees he keeps on his property, to find a terrible scene. Turns out, while he tended his bee hives, she was the victim of a sophisticated phishing scam that siphoned out all the cash from her personal accounts, and from the children’s charity she controlled.
He arrives to find dinner burning unattended, and Mrs. Parker dead from a self-inflicted gun-shot wound. After a tussle with Mrs. Parker’s F.B.I. agent daughter Verona (Emmy Raver-Lampman), he sets off to get to get even with the people who caused the death of, “the only person who ever took care of me.”
“Taking from an elderly person is as bad as stealing from a child,” he says, buzzin’ around the bad guy’s hive.
Turns out he’s a retired operative for a clandestine organization called “Beekeepers.” The deadliest of the deadly, they make John Wick look tame, and are sworn to protect the hive at all costs.
As the bodies pile up, all roads lead to Derek Danforth (Josh Hutcherson), the human grease stain at the head of Danforth Industries, a sleazy operation that makes millions by separating the vulnerable from their cash.
“Just tell me who this guy is,” Danforth demands from his head-of-security Wallace Westwyld (Jeremy Irons).
“He’s probably the last pair of eyes you’re going to stare at,” he replies.
“The Beekeeper” is Primal Statham. It’s exactly the Jason Statham movie you expect it will be.
A man of few words, Clay is someone who lets his fists do the talking, and they speak multitudes. An exercise in overkill, this is a violent movie that delights in punching the bad guys in the face. Or tying them to a runaway truck. Or nailing them repeatedly with a stapler. It’s pure good vs. evil, no more or less.
It’s also a little silly. Statham actually asks, “To bee, or not to bee?” at one point, but the laughs are part of the experience. Verona delivers one of the film’s biggest, possibly unintended, laughs when she says, to the cockney-accented Clay, “There’s some British Isles hiding in your accent.” That line makes as much sense as anything in this movie, but that’s cool because “The Beekeeper” is an old-school, over-the-top actioner, laced with one-liners, that doesn’t take itself too seriously.
Can “Creed III,” the new Michael B. Jordan film now playing in theatres, really be part of the “Rocky” franchise when it doesn’t feature either Rocky Balboa or even a hint of “Gonna Fly Now,” the original movie’s inspirational theme song?
The answer is a resounding yes. Technically the ninth movie in the series, “Creed III” finds fresh ways to echo the original while doing its own fancy footwork.
“Creed III” begins with a flashback. It’s the early 2000s and fifteen-year-old Creed (Thaddeus J. Mixson) is running with Damian “Dame” Anderson (Spence Moore II), an older guy from his group home. With a lethal right hook Dame is headed for the boxing big time; the nationals, the Olympics and then, maybe, a world championship. “You’ll be with me,” he tells young Creed. “Someone has to carry my bags.”
When things get violent one night in front of a liquor store, Creed runs to safety but Dame goes to jail.
Cut to present day.
In “Creed II” Adonis, (Jordan who also directs this time out), finally stepped away from the long shadow cast by his father Apollo Creed and mentor Rocky Balboa to become his own man. Retired—“I left Boxing,” he says. “Boxing didn’t leave me.”—his career and family life in order, he’s now a celebrity gym owner and boxing promoter.
“I spent the last seven years of my life living out my wildest dreams,” says Adonis. “Rocky. My dad. This is built on their shoulders.”
Adonis moved on, but Dame (Jonathan Majors), fresh out of jail, is mired in the past. The former prodigy boxer wants his shot at a title, at the life Creed has, and he wants to fight Creed to get it.
“You think you mad?” he asks Adonis. “Try spending half your life in a cell. Watching somebody else live your life.”
“Creed III” isn’t really a sports movie. Blows are exchanged, and there’s even a lo-fi training montage—instead of Rocky’s famous run on the 72 stone steps leading up to the entrance of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Creed bolts up the Hollywood Hills—but this is more about the trauma of the past revisited in the present, than the action in the ring.
Like the other movies in the “Rocky”/”Creed” Universe, “III” is about family. Creed’s mother (Phylicia Rashad), wife Bianca (Tessa Thompson) and daughter Amara (Mila Davis-Kent) provide family dynamics at home, but it is the bond between Creed and Dame, once as close as brothers, that provides the movie’s core relationship.
The two friends, separated by dreams, jail and success, are forever bound by memories and the shared stories of trauma. The difference between them is that Creed has managed his life with control and timing, while Dane is about rage and revenge. Their mano-et-mano showdown may ultimately unfold in slightly predictable ways by the film’s twelfth round, but Jordan and Majors are anything but obvious.
Jordan delivers the goods as Creed, but it is Majors who steals the show. Dame is a complex character, one cursed to feel left behind. “I was the best but I never got a chance to show that,” he says, his voice dripping with anger. Majors makes us feel empathy for an intimidating guy who doesn’t play by the rules, by showing both his steeliness and vulnerability.
“Creed III,” of course, leads up to a showdown between the two frenemies, but as a director Jordan finds a way to make the inevitable fight more personal, more dynamic than the usual boxing movie finale. It’s a knockout climax to a sometimes formulaic, but heartfelt, story of ambition and regret.
Like life itself, “Soul,” the new Pixar film now streaming on Disney+, is a messy and chaotic affair; a big bang where the physical and metaphysical collide.
“Soul’s” afterlife adventures begin on an earthbound plane. Joe Gardener (Jamie Foxx) is a seventh-grade music teacher who gets the big break he’s always dreamt of when he aces an audition to play piano in the band of a legendary jazz saxophonist (Angela Bassett). “Music is all I think about,” he says. “From the moment I wake up in the morning. To the moment I fall asleep at night. I was born to play. It’s my reason for living.”
He leaves the club on cloud nine, not knowing that he would soon, literally, be on cloud nine. On his way home he falls in a manhole. Knocked out, his soul separated from his body, he enters The Great Before, a strange and serene place where his spectral being—imagine Casper the Friendly ghost with a fedora and glasses—is greeted by The Counselors. They run the joint, and assign Joe to mentor a rambunctious yet-to-be-born soul called 22 (Tina Fey). “I’ve had thousands of mentors who have failed,” 22 says, “and now hate me.” Joe’s job is to find the spark, the missing part of 22’s personality, that will complete her as a person. “You can’t crush a soul here,” 22 tells Joe. “That’s what life on earth is for.”
The next step is a big one. The odd couple dive into the astral plane, plummet toward earth where 22 winds up in Joe’s body as Joe takes the form of the therapy cat assigned to his comatose body by the hospital. Trapped in the wrong bodies, the pair set off to discover the meaning of life.
Like the jazz music that dots the score, “Soul” is free-form, inventive and sometimes just a little hard to understand. It’s an existential riff on a buddy comedy. Or maybe “Freaky Friday” as directed by Frank Capra. Either way, it has a lot on its mind although it never digs too deep. Ultimately the ethereal action boils down to a simple message of mindfulness, of being aware of the simple joy life offers.
Along the way you have an imaginatively animated movie, earnest in its storytelling, laden with interesting details and nice voice work from Foxx, Pixar’s first African-American lead and Fey, who gives 22 a sardonic but philosophical edge.
Despite typical cartoony touches, like a toffee-nosed accountant soul and some feline slapstick, “Soul” is a life-affirming, poignant look at what it means to be human.
Whoever said history never repeats didn’t work in Hollywood. Remakes and reboots have taken over theatres, recycling ideas and characters in what can sometimes feel like a continuous case of déjà vu. This week we have “Creed II” a sequel to a reboot, which is also a remake of sorts of a film made before star Michael B. Jordan was even born.
When we last saw Adonis Creed (Jordan) he was a young man who never knew his dad, former world champion boxer Apollo Creed. He did, however, inherit the old man’s love of boxing and much of his skill. Working with his dad’s old friend Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) to get into ring-ready shape he, like his father before him, wins the respect of the boxing world.
In the new film he finds confronted by his father’s legacy in the form of Viktor Drago (Florian Munteanu), the son of the man who killed Apollo in the ring decades ago.
The year was 1985. Apollo Creed came out of a five-year retirement to give Soviet Olympic boxer Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren) a good old-fashioned American pummelling. Instead, with Rocky in his corner, Apollo is beaten senseless by the 6 foot 5 inch steroid-enhanced Russian. Just as Rocky drops the towel to end the fight Drago delivers the coup de grâce, a fatal blow that kills Apollo in centre ring. Determined to avenge Apollo’s death Rocky squares off with Drago in the Soviet Union in a Christmas season match. Journeyman Rocky shocks the world by winning, beating the statuesque Eastern Bloc fighter by knockout.
Flash forward to “Creed II.” The sting of that Reagan-era loss still bothers Drago (Lundgren, who else?). Shaping his son Viktor (Florian Munteanu) into a lean, mean fighting machine. Drago seeks to vicariously regain honour in the ring. “In Russia,”
Drago says, “no one will touch the Drago name. Everything changed that night.”
Father and son challenge Adonis, now the world heavyweight champion, to a match. “My son will break your biy,” Drago says, taunting Rocky. Despite Rocky’s warnings Adonis accepts the fight, looking for vengeance for a man he never knew. The showdown between the duelling sons brings into focus the shared legacy of the four men, Adonis, Viktor, Drago and Rocky.
“Creed II” isn’t really a movie about boxing. There are two brutal fight scenes but narratively this is about finding a sense of purpose, inside and outside of the ring. It’s about the why rather than the how. On that score it works. Director Steven Caple Jr. focuses on the characters allowing us to get to know them better, or in the case of Rocky and Drago, get reacquainted with them.
The film takes its time setting up the relationships before getting into the more traditional “Rocky” tropes, ie: unconventional but effective training methods and a rousing finale, complete with a riff on Bill Conti’s rousing “Rocky” theme song “Gonna Fly Now.”
This study of fathers and sons, of vengeance and reputation is really a look at brittle masculinity. These characters are all broken somehow, looking for something they are unlikely to find in the ring. “Why do you fight?” Rocky asks Adonis several times, sending him off on an introspective journey that leads him back to where his quest began, his father.
“Creed II” reverberates with the echoes of “Rocky” past but transcends being an exercise in déjà vu by amping up the emotional content to TKO levels. It is neither a rehash nor completely original work. It’s simply another puzzle piece in the feel good “Rocky” saga.
