What a waste of two hours. I’m just going to throw the first punch, and I’m not going to pull it. It was a shit movie. I watched this with my girlfriend, and we couldn’t believe how bad it was. We’re sure glad I didn’t spend $20-$50 renting it when it first came out on Amazon. Luckily, I was able to do the MGM+ free trial, after which, I promptly cancelled the subscription. The service just didn’t have any movies I wanted to see that I didn’t already own. I might have been jaded by Beekeeper as well.

I don’t plan on giving any spoilers to this movie, but if I end up doing it, I don’t really care. If you expect any big plot twists, you probably won’t get it here. The acting was lazy, the special effects looked like a grade schooler edited their first film in a free community college course for senior citizens, and the script feels like it was written by a stoned 19-year-old surfer who lives on the beach in California. Throughout the film, I had to pause it in disbelief. I couldn’t believe what I just saw, and that’s a very bad thing.

I can forgive some poor CGI and editing (more on that later), but the story was so bad, it Trumped (2024) it all. There were so many bee puns and references, it was like Jerry Smith (from Rick & Morty) was a real person and was in charge of the jokes. Once or twice, I could chuckle at and move on, but it was constantly brought up throughout the entire fucking movie. If the bee puns weren’t bad enough, the script contradicted itself on more than one occasion. Jason Statham’s character stated many times that he would not kill innocent people, and showed he wouldn’t use a gun. By the end of it, he was killing innocent people with guns. To go along with the guns, Statham’s going through a shit-ton of Secret Service agents (who half of them had “Secret Service” written on their backs, while other didn’t, even though they were wearing the same costumes, like they ran out of white vinyl and couldn’t afford more). He’s shooting them once, and they fall. When he gets caught by some weird mercenary guy wearing a bright yellow coat and talks in some Scottish/New Zealand mess of an accent, he shoots him in the face, point blank, and only is able to shoot him in one cheek, only for the guy to kick his ass and stab him five minutes later. Did I mention this guy only had one leg? Statham is kicking everyone’s ass in hand-to-hand combat, and he can’t beat up a man with one leg? How the fuck did Statham not kill this guy with a gun at point blank, but he can take down an agent with body armor with one shot from yards away? Rifle vs pistol my ass… point blank is point blank. How the fuck does he shoot the guy in the cheek and only have one entrance/exit wound? The guy isn’t a bond villain or a Marvel super hero. What the actual fuck? Did they outsource the script and divvy it up between multiple people who never read each other’s scripts or an outline of what the characters were supposed to act like? No, apparently, it was written by one guy, but it seems more believable that he told some high-school interns to write each scene and then pasted it together in Word and took credit for the whole thing.

There were times in the film that it seemed obvious they did a rewrite on the script and forgot how physics and fire work. In one scene, a gas station blows up. It is engulfed in flames. A scene or two later, the FBI shows up. Everything is charred. In the bed of a truck, they find a book that doesn’t appear to have any burn marks. The rest of the truck (except for a part of the tailgate) is burnt to a crisp. Did someone invent paper that doesn’t burn and didn’t tell me? On that, how does the top part of the tailgate still have paint and plastic on it? Someone in the props department got lazy. How fucking paper not burn when everything else on the truck (except for that small part of the tailgate) is crispier than a smore thrown into the middle of a forest fire? This is just one example of how obvious things ruin the story.

The story ruined it for me, but the special effects weren’t the right type of special. It was more like The Special Olympics kind of special. The explosions looked like an NBC FBI TV show from during COVID when they couldn’t have too many people close enough to each other to properly do an explosion and hired it out to Chinese special effects farms with employees that just learned how to use Adobe After Effects. There were scenes when you could easily tell the person flying off a bridge was a stiff dummy in hastily-put-on clothes. Half of the blood in the movie looked like they stole scenes from Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country when the Klingons were assassinated and their blood was purple. The biggest sin was Jason Statham’s stunt double appearing in the middle of the camera, looking like he won a county fair Jason-Statham-look-alike contest. Shit, Chris Pratt looked more like Jason Statham when he was on SNL in his “Jason Statham’s Jason Steakam’s” skit.

If I would have thought about it earlier, I would have played, “spot the white guy.” If that was a drinking game, and you took a shot of 100-proof rum for every white guy you saw, you wouldn’t even have a buzz. The only three white “main” characters were Jason Statham, Jeremy Irons, and Peta from Hunger Games. Everyone else was not white or a white female. Normally, I don’t really care about that shit, but I’ve seen more white people in the Congo that I saw in this movie. It would be like filming a Chinese Kung Fu movie and only have one Chinese guy and two Japanese guys in there with the rest being white, black, and Mexican. It just doesn’t make sense. It’s like they took the DEI shit and gave it an IV of bath salts and shrooms before turning it loose in a room full of disco balls.

The acting was pretty bad too. No one had any enthusiasm for for their roles. Everything felt forced. Even Jeremy Irons seemed like he was talking to a brick wall while being hopped up on NyQuil. We watched some interviews the stars did about the films. They seemed like they were hostages reading a ransom note in front of a camera and a guy with a machete and a ski mask. They didn’t even really talk about the movie.

In the end, you can tell this was a low-budget film that looks more like a direct-to-DVD release from the 90s. With a $40 million budget, Jason Statham reportedly received a quarter of that just to appear in this movie. If the script was good, this would have been a fun action flick worthy of two hours… but it wasn’t. I’ve seen better stories from a kindergartner written in crayons. Add in stupid shit like fire-proof paper and the military riding through Boston hanging on the side of a Chevy Saburban instead of an H1 just adds to the disbelief that takes me out of the movie.

Bad acting, horrible visuals, a juvenile script, unbelievable actions from characters, and the blatant disregard for physics and material science just makes this movie a steaming pile of horse shit burning in a dumpster in the middle of a nuclear wasteland. It made me realize that I would have been better ahead punching myself in the face with brass knuckles than watch this fucking movie.