The Beekeeper (2024, Ayer)
David Ayer initially caught my attention at the age of 12 upon a screening of Street Kings with my grandpa. I was really into violence at the time, but Ayer mostly dropped off the map for me until Suicide Squad, which continues to hold the distinction of worst hatchet job in movie history. It is so incomprehensible it borders Pynchon-level intrigue: a flurry of phantasmagorphic images that don't hang together in the slightest, searching and searching for a story that it never quite finds. His Suicide Squad is as vivid a nightmare scenario of the failures of studio filmmaking as we're ever liable to get.
As such, I then naturally took a keen interest in Ayer's career. How, I wondered, does a filmmaker follow-up what is among the worst movies ever made? My thoughts on that are here. He then dropped off my radar again, since upon inspection it seems he released a movie in 2020 called The Tax Collector which I did not see. But then, in the doldrums of January 2024, he surprised me with a steely throwback thriller in the spirit of the late 80s and early 90s. A few names that came to mind for me while watching included a pair of Johns Ayer probably likes a lot: McTiernan (of Die Hard fame, but mostly beloved by me for his glorious Last Action Hero) and Woo (of Mission: Impossible II fame in the U.S., I guess, and although it's his most compromised movie it's still pretty fun).
In an action film era where self-flagellation reigns supreme, it's nice to catch a movie that harkens to that decidedly confident, un-self-aware style. When The Beekeeper is goofy--and it is goofy often--it does not wink at us and tell us that it is in on the joke: it just tells the joke. Game performances from the cast certainly contribute to its success. Statham deserves credit for carrying the thing, but Jeremy Irons takes this one away with his slimy take on a greedy former CIA director.
Along those lines, it's becoming increasingly clear to me that Ayer is a politically-oriented director; it's difficult for me to parse out exactly what his views are, however. He's never spoken publicly about it to my knowledge, and I can find no writing on how it permeates his films. He's wary of government agencies and loves guns: even the posters for every one of his films contains a character holding a weapon. Highly trained, narrow-minded murder machines feature prominently, yet there's a vague sense of solidarity to cut the libertarian streak. Maybe it's not for lack of trying that his perspective doesn't fully emerge. “Normally, I make more serious dramas,” Ayer has said. “This is just a fun, escapist thrill ride.” Why is it, then, that the politics feels more cogent here than any other of his movies? Characters actually say what they're thinking--or rather, what he's thinking--here. He may not have written the script, but this is Ayer through and through. Paraphrases include, "I have to protect the hive," and "are you going to do what's legal, or what's right?" Perhaps beehive art is a better lane for him than the elephant art he thinks he makes.
