The Rundown: ‘The Beekeeper’ Looks Like The Most Jason Statham Movie Possible

The Rundown is a weekly column that highlights some of the biggest, weirdest, and most notable events of the week in entertainment. The number of items could vary, as could the subject matter. It will not always make a ton of sense. Some items might not even be about entertainment, to be honest, or from this week. The important thing is that it’s Friday, and we are here to have some fun.

ITEM NUMBER ONE – Need to see him punch a bee

One of the many things I appreciate about Jason Statham is how many of his movies tell you exactly what his character is doing right in the title. So, like, in The Transporter he is transporting. In Spy, he plays a spy. And in The Mechanic, he’s an assassin, which is apparently what some assassins call their work. (I also appreciate that I learn exciting new things like this from his movies.) And I am pleased to announce that this trend will continue with his next movie, The Beekeeper, from Suicide Squad director David Ayer.

There’s a new trailer for the movie out this week, and I swear I am going to post it here in a second, but first, look at some of these descriptions of this movie the various trade publications have used since it was first announced a year or two ago.

Statham stars as a former operative of a powerful and clandestine organization known as “Beekeepers.” He single-handedly takes on a sinister organization that wronged a friend in a series of violent encounters that end up having national stakes.

God yes.

The film will chart the story of how one man’s brutal campaign for vengeance takes on national stakes after he is revealed to be a former operative of a powerful and clandestine organization known as the ‘Beekeepers’.

Straight into my veins, please.

The Bee Keeper is a lightning-paced thriller deeply steeped in the mythology of Bee Keeping.

DEEPLY STEEPED IN THE MYTHOLOGY OF BEE-KEEPING

WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN?

ACTUALLY, I DON’T CARE

JUST GIVE IT TO ME

This was already my favorite movie ever made before I saw a single second of the actual action. But yes, I will post the trailer now, and yes, it does nothing to dissuade me from that bold statement.

Okay, here’s what we have going on in this trailer, as far as I can tell. Jason Statham plays a literal and figurative beekeeper — like, he keeps bees, but he’s also a member of a secretive society known as Beekeepers who step in where laws fall short — who goes on the warpath after a woman who cares for him very much (played by Phylicia Rashad!!!) commits suicide after getting scammed out of her life savings by a shady criminal organization led by Jeremy Irons. You should see how excited I am after typing that out. I’m practically floating.

It gets better. The trailer is littered with scenes where Statham beats up 8-10 people at once and some of the best dialogue you will ever see. In addition to classics like “You’re telling me one man did this?” and “We have to kill him before he kills his way to the top,” which is maybe the most Jason Statham Movie Quote ever committed to film, we also have all of these. Words alone can’t do them justice. I made screencaps.

Yes.

YES

OH MY GOD

GET IT???

BECAUSE HE’S A BEEKEEPER

AND HE’S USING HONEY AS A WEAPON

YES

I am absolutely renting out an entire movie theater when this comes out. You can come, too. We can all show up in beekeeper hoods and make it a whole thing. Let’s make it the biggest movie of the year. Let’s force their hand and squeeze a dozen sequels out of this. Let’s make it the next John Wick but with Statham and bees. I am not joking.

It’s important to support cinematic excellence. We owe it to ourselves as a society.

ITEM NUMBER TWO – The Morning Show continues to amaze

Reasonable arguments can be made that The Morning Show is my favorite television show, which is a pretty wild thing to say when you factor in the thing where I don’t even watch it. I tried, way back in the first season, but I couldn’t get into the experience as a viewer. It was just too… much, which I realize is pretty rich coming from me right after I posted a million screencaps from a movie where Jason Statham keeps bees. But still. We talked about all of this the other week when we discussed how Jon Hamm is in the new season as a handsome tech bro who is obsessed with space, kind of like if Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, you know, looked like Jon Hamm, and how I’ve been consuming the show entirely by watching the brief moments he is on the screen and reading the episode summaries, which are kind of hilarious without context. The important thing here is that Jon Hamm and Reese Witherspoon got in a big rocket and went to space already this season.

Which brings me to this week’s episode, which I have not seen and probably will never see, but which sounds truly incredible. The only real backstory you need here is as follows:

• Reese’s character, an anchor of the titular morning show, has been keeping a big secret with her boss, one so big that they were prepared to pay hackers $50 million to keep them from disclosing it
• This season takes place in 2021
• WE ARE DOING THE INSURRECTION

Look at these maniacs. From a write-up in the Hollywood Reporter:

Well, “Love Island” answered the mystery when it revealed that Bradley, after breaking up with Laura (Julianna Margulies) and leaving their quarantine hub in Montana, goes to cover what would become the Jan. 6 insurrection in Washington, D.C. And while running through the halls of the U.S. Capitol to capture riot footage with her iPhone, her camera zooms in on a familiar face: Her brother, Hal (Joe Tippett), whom she unintentionally records assaulting a police officer during the riot.

Bradley, distraught over the discovery, decides to delete the footage of her brother’s assault and omit it from her reporting on the insurrection. Torn between her career as a journalist and her empathy for her only surviving family member after just losing their mother to COVID-19, Bradley chooses her brother.

Do you see what I mean here? About this show being just a blast to follow as a casual observer from a safe distance? Go read those two paragraphs again. Elle Woods from Legally Blonde, who just went to space with Don Draper from Mad Men, caught her brother doing violence to a cop during the actual insurrection and chose to sit on the story — journalism be damned — because she was still grieving the loss of her mother during the pandemic.

That’s incredible. And it’s a good reminder of just how wild the last few years have been in real life. But mostly it’s just wild. I can’t wait to read every recap of what happens next. I hope Jon Hamm buys a social media site. I hope Jennifer Aniston interviews Trump and he’s played by Paul Giamatti in a floppy blond wig. I hope everyone gets trapped on the Ever Given for a week in the Suez Canal and gets really into Wordle. The best part is that none of these are out of the question.

Just a remarkable show.

ITEM NUMBER THREE – Rez Dogs was so good

Speaking of remarkable shows…

Actually, no. That’s not fair. I can’t use the same word to describe The Morning Show, a messy but star-studded nostalgia hour, and Reservation Dogs, a legitimately good show that just wrapped up its three-season run. I wrote about Rez Dogs and why it was so special last week so we don’t have to get into it all again, but I did want to highlight something its creator Sterlin Harjo said in a recent interview. The whole thing is worth a read, if only because the guy brings such a cool outsider perspective to the making of a television show, but this part about the universality of death and how it connects people really jumped out to me.

I remember when she passed away, in the back of my mind, I kept thinking, “Wow, we don’t have her anymore to do this. The person that took care of us is gone now.” At her house, after she passed with all of her grandkids and cousins, aunts and uncles, we were eating and I was looking around. All of her granddaughters, without missing a beat, we’re doing exactly what she did.

Every time we lost somebody, they were taking care of everyone. They were making sure you were fed. They were cooking. They were making sure that you felt the love, and they didn’t have to be taught that. They just saw that experience their whole life, and they knew exactly what they needed to do now. I think that a lot of that just comes from being from such a tight, large community. But all of this is a really beautiful thing, and I wanted to show that in this show.

The best part about this is that Rez Dogs, in addition to being all the things he said there and a show that made me cry multiple times in its final season, was still, for the most part, a silly comedy. It was just so good.

Please go watch Rez Dogs if you haven’t yet. I am rarely serious in this column — or, like, ever, for better and worse — but I do mean this: This show was one of the best and funniest and most touching things I’ve ever seen on television. I cannot imagine a world where you read and enjoy the things I write and do not also like this show. Watch it. For both of us.

ITEM NUMBER FOUR – Only Murders in the Building is a nice fuzzy blanket

Three things are true here…

THING NUMBER ONE: Only Murders in the Building ended its third season this week on a fun little cliffhanger I will not spoil.

THING NUMBER TWO: The always-terrific Brian Phillips wrote a fun and insightful piece at The Ringer about the show and how fun it is that this series about three weirdos who are obsessed with the numerous murders that happen inside their luxurious Manhattan apartment building is also a cozy little relaxing watch, like the television equivalent of a warm blanket and a cup of hot tea.

THING NUMBER THREE: It’s a little frustrating to know that my peak out here is “second best Brian at writing about pop culture on the internet,” but I am trying to deal with it in a mature and healthy wNO YOU SHUT UP LOSERS

… Uh, sorry. I did say I was trying. Anyway, here’s a good bit from the very good article you should go read.

In this sense, Only Murders belongs to the crime subgenre known as the cozy mystery: stories that use violent death, somewhat counterintuitively, to reassure their audiences that the world is a fundamentally nice place to be. Short, Gomez, and Martin are the urban American heirs to a long line of amateur sleuths in quaint English villages: your Miss Marples, your murder-solving vicars, your inquisitive librarians who are never late for tea. Like other cozy mysteries, Only Murders depicts an idealized landscape, but where the English version tends to show us a pastoral world of rosebushes and thatched cottages, Hulu gives us an aspirational, faintly literary New York, an even sweeter version of Wes Anderson’s vision of the city in The Royal Tenenbaums. It’s a world of uniformed doormen, courtyards with fountains, antique theaters with comical ghosts. The neighbors are grouchy but charming; the bassoonist practicing nearby is first chair at the symphony. (She’s also a murderer, but leave that to the side.) Even the show’s title is rendered in a typeface clearly meant to evoke The New Yorker. And sure, that’s partly the show’s way of flashing a Bat-Signal to its desired demographic, but it’s also a legitimate piece of world-building, a way of conjuring the sort of romanticized domesticity on which the cozy mystery depends.

Okay, three more true things…

THING NUMBER ONE: Everything the other Brian says here is true and correct, and extends to the show’s ability to land perfect big-name guest stars, which we talked about the other week when I wrote about how much fun it looked like everyone was having while they were making it.

THING NUMBER TWO: You have not seen acting until you have seen a fasting and sugar-crazed Paul Rudd annihilate a cookie in his dressing room, and yes, I will post a GIF, but no, it does not do it justice.

THING NUMBER THREE: Between this show and The Afterparty on Apple TV, we are really in a golden age of silly little comedies about murder and I am really enjoying all of it very much.

Good chat. I suspect I will have more to say about this show next week. Stay tuned. And watch the finale so we are all on the same page. I am giving you lots of extra homework in this column today. I apologize but it’s for your own good. I may be tough but at least I am fair.

(I am neither of those things.)

ITEM NUMBER FIVE – This is my favorite television show now

I can’t improve on this video so let’s go straight to the bullet points:

• This is a TikTok by Martin Scorsese’s 23-year-old daughter where she quizzes the legendary director on his knowledge of modern slang
• It is honestly adorable, both for its content and for the fact that Martin Scorsese is willing to let himself look silly on TikTok to make his daughter happy
• I would watch an entire show where children and/or grandchildren quiz their famous older relatives about things currently happening in pop culture

If Killers of the Flower Moon is half as good as this it will be the best movie Scorsese has ever made.

READER MAIL

If you have questions about television, movies, food, local news, weather, or whatever you want, shoot them to me on Twitter or at brian.grubb@uproxx.com (put “RUNDOWN” in the subject line). I am the first writer to ever answer reader mail in a column. Do not look up this last part.

From Jeremy:

I am sure that you’ve watched the newest season of “Welcome to Wrexham”, and picked up on this: “King Charles was ‘very pleased with himself’ after cracking a joke with Rob McElhenney.”

My question- is there any chance he actually has watched “It’s Always Sunny”? Maybe he is a big fan. Maybe he asked his staff to make him a Rum Ham, or hums “Dayman” to himself under his breath while signing important documents, etc. I love the idea of him and Camilla cackling in their weird royal accents while Danny DeVito wriggles naked and sweaty out of a couch. I can imagine you of all people can imagine better scenarios (Kitton Mittons for the Queen’s corgis???). That show rules.

This is just a really good email. One of the best I’ve ever gotten. I’ve spent probably… I don’t know, five or six hours since I received it getting a real good mental image of Charles watching Always Sunny. My current favorite aspect of this visual is him calling Meghan Markle at like midnight, three hours into a binge on Hulu, to tell her she should try to get a role on the show as she rolls her eyes and does that “blah blah blah” gesture you do with your hand when someone is blabbering on and on when you’re on the phone with them. It’s fun.

Also, please take a few minutes this weekend and think about the King of England watching Charlie Day kill rats with a stick in a dingy Philadelphia bar, and then think about whether he thinks that’s what all bars in Philadelphia are actually like. I need him to agree to a wide-ranging interview about this. Preferably with me.

Thank you for this gift, Jeremy. I will cherish it through the weekend.

AND NOW, THE NEWS

To Philadelphia!

A fishy situation unfolded in North Philadelphia Wednesday thanks to some shellfish thieves!

SHELLFISH THIEVES

The early morning theft ended with 184 cases of crab clusters valued at $73,000 being stolen from the back of a tractor-trailer, according to officials.

Police say they were met with several fleeing vehicles when they arrived at the 1800 block of Germantown Avenue around 1:45 a.m.

Lots to like here but my current favorite thing is the vivid image I have in my head of dozens of neon Hondas racing away from an organized crab heist like a scene from 2 Fast 2 Furious. Yes, Ludacris has a big pile of crab legs in the passenger seat.

An open tractor-trailer was then discovered with its driver asleep in the front.

Officers woke the driver, and informed him that trailer was broken into.

God, I love this guy. Just sleeping in the cabin of his crab truck while thieves make off with $75k worth of high-end shellfish they presumably have a plan for. Good for him.

The driver told police he didn’t hear or see anyone take the items, and that the container was locked with a metal seal and padlock.

Two notes here, once again via bullet point:

• I need this to be a movie or television show at some point in the next 18-24 months
• I need Statham to play the truck driver and I need him to hunt down the thieves

Call it The Crabman and get it in theaters as soon as possible. Thank you.