Contemporary 2024 – The Magnificent 60s

The Asunta Case (2024) ****

You didn’t used to get away with this. Until recently, screen murderers had to be unveiled or at the very least, if getting away with their crime, come unstuck in the final few minutes as with Jagged Edge (1985) or tip the wink to the audience in the manner of Keyser Soze in The Usual Suspects (1995). About the only thing Netflix can genuinely take positive credit for is the invention of a subgenre of movies/series about unsolved crimes. And now it’s taken that a step further with programs where the killer(s) are apprehended but you never find out why they committed their appalling crimes.

The Asunta Case was very much the Spanish equivalent of the Madeleine McCann Case. The latter attracted global publicity, the former headlines that raged in Spain for years. However, Asunta, the 12-year adopted daughter of the recently separated Rosario and Alfonso, was soon found not far from the couple’s country estate, albeit with hands tied with red twine, and dead.

Although the couple fell under immediate suspicion, there was little sign of motive. Would the mother, a bundle of nerves and very thin, have been capable of drugging and suffocating the child and bundling her into a car and dumping her on a piece of waste ground? The father appeared a devoted parent and no cameras could find evidence of him anywhere near the estate or the area where the child was found.

So Netflix plays its usual narrative tricks. The couple appear guilty, then innocent, then guilty, then innocent. The investigating team hide evidence that doesn’t back up their case. A witness arrives late in the day. There’s a question of how bright the moon was that night. You can’t match two ends of this kind of twine to prove that the material that bound the child was the same as some found in a waste paper basket. Alfonso is accused of hiding his computer. Jail cells are bugged. There’s a hint that money might be involved. The media undermine the judiciary process by digging up juicy morsels that may or may not pertain to the case and may or may not influence a jury. In the absence of anything conclusive the evidence is almost entirely circunstantial.

What helps the Netflix tale most is the actress (Candela Pena) portrayng Rosario. I’ve no idea how accurate a portrayal this might be. But a more whiny, self-centred individual would be hard to find. Quite how she manages to conduct an affair just prior to the murder defies belief. As does Alfonso’s continued commitment to his unfaithful wife.

It could well be that Rosario’s witlessness, coming to pieces, is the result of loss, or, equally, the impact of guilt. She is a lawyer, so you would expect her not just to be above suspicion, but with a good idea of how the system works, enough to work her way around it. Alfonso (Tristan Ulloa) is a journalist so he, too, must be accustomed to the ways of the media and that refusing to talk will keep the media at bay long enough for his constant protestations of innocence to take effect.

As with most of these dramatized mini series, the information is structured in a way that keeps you on your toes. The situation for the investigative team is complicated in that the chief investigating officer, here deemed a “judge”, has to cope with a father with dementia while one of the cops is undergoing fertility treatment.

And the dramatists do the police work for them, presenting the circumstantial evidence as if it is fact. So what we are given are various options, how the couple could not have committed the crime, in which case the criminal, still at large, could strike again, and how they very much could. And this is after various red herrings dressed up very much as the menu du jour have been discarded, principal among which is the idea that the girl has been sexually abused, as she is seen early on wearing clothing and make-up inappropriate for her age, such photos found on the missing computer, and yet with a genuinely innocent explanation.

The investigation appears to focus more on Rosario – killer mother worse than killer father it would seem – although Alfonso’s implacability would drvie you to drink. The investigators don’t get off scot free either, complicit in permitting the judge to ignore evidence favorable to the defense. In the end the crime is solved, or at least a verdict reached, but the truth remains hidden, neither of the accused fessing up, no psychiatric reports to provide clarification, no suggestion that Alfonso did it to inflict terrible injury on the mother more than the child, which is often the case in child murders.

The dubbing’s annoying and you might enjoy this more watching it in the original Spanish with subtitles.

Whatever, it is totally absorbing, for the most part because of the mystery of the couple themselves, how they came to be in this position, and whether doubt remains.

Compulsive viewing.

Unfrosted (2024) **

It’s an easy trap to fall into. You believe a much-loved actor couldn’t possibly lead you so astray. You are determined to give him every chance to proof your instincts wrong. You turn off at 15 minutes, then you feel you’ve done him an injustice, after all he is a major figure making his directorial debut, shouldn’t you cut him more slack? You switch off again at 35 minutes and are hit by the same guilty feelings. So you stick it out till the end and what do you get? One decent sequence with JFK of all people berating our nincompoops for asking for a favor when in one of his most famous speeches he had pointedly said, “Ask not.”

Indulgence gone mad. Or, just another day in the wacky world of Netflix. Honestly, who in their right mind would greenlight the directorial debut of a television comic who has never made a movie, clearly doesn’t understand what makes a movie, and that a 90-minute picture needs a completely different approach to a 25-minute television episode, and as obviously couldn’t care less?

There’s enough to satirize in the world of business instead of some dumb satire about the creation of a cereal that defies convention. If it was such a massive success story why did it take so long so cross the Atlantic, a couple of decades as far as I’m aware. But then, over here, we were still struggling just to work out why we needed to buy a toaster when you could just toast bread under a grill.

Clearly, the director-star Jerry Seinfeld, who’s always been enamored of his own material, was bored with being so wealthy that he decided he would inflict his latest joke on a disinterested public. I own up to having been a big fan of the Seinfeld schtick of a show about nothing and perhaps that’s where he’s gone wrong here. Because this is about something. At the very least rivalry between two cereal giants.

But these two apparently great companies are run by people who don’t notice that the cleaner sticking his mop in your face has a camera attached to it and the guy appearing at an inappropriate time in your business strategy meeting has (wait for it) a camera attached to his vacuum.

Sure, Seinfeld has rounded up a bunch of his pals and you can spot the likes of Amy Schumer, Melissa McCarthy, Christian Slater and Jon Hamm. It says a lot for their acting intelligence that they all thought this was a humdinger. I did like Hugh Grant playing Tony the Tiger since he’s grown a lot better at making a fool of himself.

The bizarre aspect of the whole enterprise is that there’s certainly a truth here. Any new product can have significant effect on other players in the market. Here, it was milk and sugar. A breakfast item that does not require milk is going to damage sales of milk, forever associated with breakfast and as one of the characters so crassly puts it the first thing everyone ever drinks (birth is the clue in case you need that spelled out). Sugar is coyly referred to as the “white powder,” making a connection with that other well-known epidemic, and only in passing ruminating on the damage sugar has done to teeth, without making the obvious link between why milk, which is so good for you, is associated with sugar, which is so bad,

In the middle of it Seinfeld prances around like an inane cat, the same dry delivery that worked in in his series painfully not working here. Everyone else looks as though they are having such fun, like this is a pantomime and everyone can just, well jolly gee, over-act to their heart’s content.

This kind of picture is by now par for the course for Netflix. Hollywood had a name for this kind of movie. Vanity project. Usually, it was the price to pay for being contractually saddled with a star so big. Or, having been saddled with such a disaster, you could extract payment in the form of them making a film they had previously balked at. Sometimes, you end up doing both of you an enormous favor, The Sixth Sense, a colossal hit, the price Bruce Willis paid for his vanity project. Who says vanity doesn’t pay?

The galling part is that the fact that I’ve stuck through it will be notched up as a success by Netflix, added to the millions of other watched minutes by which the company determines a hit, rather than having some way of measuring how many switched off a sixth of the way through like I should have done.

I don’t even know why I’m giving it two stars. In terms of laffs, it’s got as many as Orgy of the Dead, my all-time stinker.

Avoid.

Abigail (2024) ** – Seen at the Cinema

Someone hasn’t pointed out to the directors (there’s two of them) – or they’ve decidedly to pointedly ignore – the crazy notion that you need someone to root for in a horror film, even if it’s someone you start out disliking. Nor has anyone seemingly touched upon the grating error of the premise. You’re planning a $50 million kidnap, so you hire a team of top professionals, who turn out not to be able to control their liquor, get drunk or stoned within an hour of a 24-hour shift, and can’t even keep to their own basic rules which include not mentioning each other by name or revealing their faces to the victim.

The twist – that somehow they’re the ones trapped – would have a chance of succeeding if the principals were capable of extracting an ounce of sympathy from the audience. We’ve got an ex-junkie single mom too keen on playing the victim, an ex-cop, a muscle man from the Dumb and Dumber Selection Box, a sociopath, a rich girl looking for kicks and a guy who may be more mainstram but acts dodgy.

The other twists – that the kidnapped girl is actually a vampire and that her dad is some feared villain – don’t count for much unless it’s the girl we’re supposed to be rooting for because (twist number 22) vampires aren’t born that way but need to be bitten and guess who did that indoctrination, yep, the bad dad, so, technically, this counts as child abuse. So, technically, little Abigail would get my sympathy vote except she’s caught up in one awful movie.

What with exploding bodies, decapitated corpses, a lake of dead people, mirrors with miracualous properties and the usual stakes, garlic and crosses failing to work it’s a blood-drenched hotch potch that wears out its welcome very quickly. Not even worth it to see posh Downton Abbey alumni Dan Stevens and Matthew Goode sharpening their fangs.

Saw this on a double-bill with Challengers. This kind of counter-programming has worked in the past. But not here, sadly.

Challengers (2024) ** – Seen at the Cinema

Am getting a bit fed up with critical wishful thinking where reviewers pump up the latest effort from a “visionary” director, the movie they wish they had seen rather than the dreadful evidence of overblown miscalculation in front of their eyes. Hammy television-sized performances, fidgety faces, actors who don’t know what to do in a close-up, and a director who doesn’t know how to tell even as simplistic a tale as this without indulging in slow-mo, bizarre camera angles and sex in a storm.

Luca Guadagnino (Bones and All, 2022), in making easily the worst sports movie of all time, is an early contender for this year’s Razzies. And I’m hoping not too many people are going to fall for the marketing line that this is sizzling with sexuality when it is one of the most tepid you will ever see, beyond the kind of dialog that would have shamed Porky’s (1981).

And if you’re going to go down the Christopher Nolan flashback route, try and do it without just the title of “earlier” – if it had gotten any earlier we would have been back in the twentieth century. Any insights into tennis are restricted to the jaw-dropping revelation that there are winners and losers and not everyone’s teenage dreams can come true, and that the prom queen isn’t going to pick the sexiest lad but the one with the most financial promise.

If you’re interested, the plot goes something like this. Best pals and tennis prodigies Art (Mike Faist) and Patrick (Josh O’Connor) both fancy the same woman, Tashi (Zendaya), a cut above them in the prodigy stakes, and she thinks they actually fancy each other and engineers a scene where the two boys kiss each other. Having initially chosen the charismatic Patrick as her love mate, she changes her mind and opts for Art. A dozen or so years later – the chronology is less than exact – the rivals meet up again in a low-level tennis tournament, Art, supposedly a U.S. Open champ, Patrick a long-time loser who hasn’t made the grade.

None of the principals look as if they know one end of a tennis racquet from the other, but that doesn’t matter because the director is so busy with the dizzying visuals (including a tennis ball POV) he could have turned performing dogs into champs. Luckily for us, the moment there’s some kind of emotional climax (or attempt at one) the director hits us with some heavy music.

Josh O’Connor (Lee, 2023) has the saving grace of some screen charm but Zendaya (Dune: Part Two, 2024) blows her screen credibility with a gurning performance.

Awful.

Monkey Man (2024) ***

I can tell you right away why this hasn’t proved the box office breakout predicted. Way too slow, way too many ideas, way too much repetition, the obvious flaws of a debut director who nobody had the sense to rein in. Dev Patel (The Green Knight, 2021) is writer-producer-director and clearly took control of the editing suite because this should have seriously been pruned of about 20 minutes.

It’s a revenge thriller and supposedly the protagonist is better motivated because somebody didn’t kill his dog (John Wick, 2014) or his bees (The Beekeeper, 2023) but his mom. But this revenge is insanely slow-burn. It’s taken him the best part of two decades to take any action. And in the meantime, he’s had plenty of time to dwell on an idyllic childhood, and the bad guy who murdered his mom, because every two minutes whatever action there is stops dead so we can have another interminable flashback.

If you want a crash course on Indian mysticism and gods and religion, this one’s for you, but my guess if that wouldn’t be a priority for anyone turning up expecting the next John Wick or Beekeeper. And it that’s not enough side issue, there’s some malarkey involving a corrupt politician, corrupt cop and corrupt guru and a land-grab to boot plus the need to set free a whole bunch of sex workers. So, sub-plot mania.

I’m not sure I’m convinced either by the bongo-drum keep-fit technique that turns a loser in the ring into a top combatant, especially after, having spent an age demonstrating how much our hero has improved his pugilistic skills he fells his first opponent with a kick. Cage fighting without the cage, I guess.

But there are pluses, once the director sees fit to get to the action and not ramble on about philosophical mumbo-jumbo and there are a couple of fascinating characters, venomous brothel-owner Queenie (Ashwini Kalsekar) who has the best lines, and the low-life Alphonso (Pitobash) with a souped-up tuk-tuk. But mostly, we’re stuck with Kid aka Monkey Man (Dev Patel) as he takes an age to work out how he’s going to get his revenge and makes the audience labor over working out what happened to his mom and why he got his hands so badly burned. Put those two ideas together and the audience has worked it out in a trice, but the director didn’t think so, so fed it in very slowly bit by bit.

Anyway, Kid is the kind of boxer who makes a poor living being fed to the kings of the ring, he gets paid more if he bleeds. And he’s not doing this for just the money, but, purportedly, to punish himself for his mother’s death and relieve the pain inside, some kind of insane self-harming, that only stops when a guru (the good one not the bad one) tells him he has to direct his inner violence to good purpose.

There’s some nifty stuff about how he manages to get a job in the club/ restaurant (it’s never clear) owned by Queenie whose only connection to the tale is that his mother’s killer, police chief Rana (Sikander Kher), is that he was carrying a box of matches with her logo. I’m sure he could have just gunned the police chief down in the street since this is the kind of guy who swaggers around as if he owns the street, but the narrative dictates he needs to gain access to the club/brothel’s inner sanctum and that’s where Alphonso comes in.

Once it gets going it’s satisfying stuff and with some excellent occasionally innovative fight scenes. Not so sure about the soundtrack, “The Rivers of Babylon” as a throat is cut, “Roxanne” when we reach the brothel. But there’s too much sub-plot to wade through before the action gets core.

When Netflix, hardly an arbiter of taste, rejects your movie, you should take note of their objections which I guess would be the same as mine rather than trying to foist those flaws on the public via cinema release, no matter if Jordan Peele is your staunchest supporter. It’s no surprise to me this hasn’t won a release in India either – blamed on its political stance, apparently – because the same problems would apply.

So that’s a shame. A director with too much to say and decides he might only get the one chance to say it so dumps it all into his debut picture. Let’s hope he gets a second chance and is mature enough to listen to an editor.

Excellent action but, boy, you have to wait.

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024) ****

Monster mash-up that delivers. Hollow Earth hits the target, a better parallel universe/ multiverse/monsterverse than all the other verses put together, not to mention it’s also of the versus inclination with any number of big beasties (I lost count to be honest) going head-to-head and super bonkers malarkey of giant apes riding prehistoric monsters. Plus, if you’re of a sentimental nature, and given that this week I’ve been hit from all side by tales of a maternal bent, whose heart would not give a whimper to see big bad Godzilla all curled up for the night in the Colosseum in Rome. Or for that matter Kong taking a paternal interest in a bad wee mini-Kong. Compared to the emotions stirred by these giants, boffin Ilene (Rebecca Hall) struggling with her maternal issues comes over as rammed-in and wishy-washy.

Having taken Mother’s Instinct to ruthless task for its illogical plotlines, I am happy to do a complete somersault and let the monster punch-up off scot-free for all its inconsistencies and coincidences because, heck you know it, fun always triumphs. Plus we’ve got a hippie vet Trapper (Dan Stevens) who, despite awkward accent and Hawaiian shirt, is loose enough to chill out straight-laced Ilene with podcaster du jour Bernie (Bryan Tyree Henry) on hand to add humor.

Throw in some Aztec/Inca-style ancient civilisation, the revival of another Japanese kaiju in Mothra, people who communicate with telepathy, all sorts of daft exposition, Godzilla snorting up radiation like it was coke, pyramids of various kinds, more rabbit holes than you could shake a bunny at, an ape that goes all Raiders of the Lost Ark with a whip made out of bones and full-on Planet of the Apes knockdown.

I’m not even going to bother with the plot, what I can remember of it, except to say Ilene and Trapper need to get Godzilla and Kong together to take on the giant ape villain and the monster he rode in on otherwise (guess what) (I think) the world as we know it (or at last this invented world) will cease to exist.

The humans do their best not to get in the way of the fun. Trapper is smart and glib and occasionally a genius and Ilene is smart but weighted down with maternity while the object of her affection is stuck with the where-do-I-belong trope and mostly stares off soulfully into the distance. It’s the monsters that bring the humanity. That little scamp of a baby giant ape takes some handling, always ready (literally) to bite the hand that feeds him while you gotta feel sorry for Godzilla having to tramp through all those cities that someone stuck in his way when all he wants is a nice nest close by a nuclear plant.

Plus we get ice ice baby. The bad ape’s chained prisoner blasts out ice instead of fire, like he’s an exile from the Night King, but at least he’s not like the latest Ghostbusters iteration that’s been heavily trumpeted in the trailer only not to appear till what seems like the last five minutes in order to give Bill Murray a weak punchline.

This was easily the best part of this week’s Quadruple Bill. I’m not even going to review Ghostbusters – it seems to have got lost in the family nonsense that’s infecting virtually every decent series, meaning we’ve now got to accommodate the size of casts that used to be an attraction in pictures like Lawrence of Arabia, but now feels like an overstuffed very threadbare cushion, and could we care less.

Adam Wingard (Godzilla vs Kong, 2021) directs though spare a nod for the CGI team.

Let’s hear it for these mean mothers.

Immaculate (2024) ***

As you know we live in a Big Brother pampered society and even going to the movies comes with a health warning. But, I have to tell you, Dear British Censor, “strong bloody violence” doesn’t cut it. Now, I’m as happy to be scared out of my wits as the next guy, jump-out-of-your-seat shocks are part of the fun of horror pictures. But having to close your eyes to plain sadistic action – tongues cut off, feet branded, bellies of pregant women cut open, babies stoned to death – sorry that’s a bit more than “strong.” Maybe torture porn should have a category of its own.

Which is a shame because this is a clever twist on the old trope of the demonic child as proferred by Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Omen (1976) – possibly no coincidence either that’s beaten the Omen remake to the punch. Instead of satanic satanists it’s satanic priests and nuns mainlining on some kind of more scientific genetic Da Vinci Code.

And thanks to the runaway success of last year’s Anybody But You, there’s another element at play here, the breakout star’s follow-up picture to gauge if breakout picture was fluke or welcoming a new star into the firmament. Julia Roberts followed up massive hit Pretty Women (1990) with tepid thriller Sleeping with the Enemy (1991) and the soppy Dying Young (1991) but nobody cared how indifferent the follow-ups were and both turned into big hits and wow a star is born. Sandra Bullock arrives out of nowhere in Speed (1994) and follows up with ropey romance While You Were Sleeping (1995) and tepid thriller The Net (1995) and bingo a star is born.

So this is breakout star Sydney Sweeney’s follow-up – excluding Madame Web of course – and I’m not sure if it will sweep up that many of her newfound followers in its wake. Not because it doesn’t deliver the horror goods because outside of the torture porn it’s pretty creepy and with effective twists and if you want to see a bloodied Sydney creep out of a hole in the ground and give birth and then, as if confounding her newfound bubbly screen personality, beat the baby to death then this one is for you.

Anyway, let’s backtrack. Cecilia (Sydney Sweeney), a young American who had a near-death experience, hives off to an Italian convent filled mostly with the devout, the lost and the broken. It’s not Nun of Monza, and it’s not terribly strict either and even though she couldn’t be bothered learning Italian (don’t these nuns speak English?) there’s always someone on hand to help translate. She makes one friend and one enemy, but, hey, like any boarding school that’d be par for the course.

So, here she is settling in, becoming a bride of Christ, taking vows of chastity, obedience and poverty when suddenly charming Fr Tedeschi (Alvaro Monte) comes over all nasty, questioning whether she is a vigin or not. Just when that is established to everyone’s content comes the zinger – she’s pregnant by what is known in Catholic Church parlance as immaculate conception. Quite how this occurred is never explained, except the convent has an artefact claimed to be one of the nails that stuck Jesus to the cross and therefore containing remants of blood (we’re going Jurassic Park here) and thus his genetic code.

You won’t be surprised to learn that she’s not the first victim of this kind of conception. Things start to get fairly nasty after this – someone tries to drown here and then we’re in for the tongue-cutting, branding etc – and Cecilia goes from docile to vengeful. She comes up with a clever trick to escape and when that doesn’t work has to find another way out of her dilemma and if that involves strangling someone with rosary beads that seems nicely ironic in the circumstances.

It was certainly a day of mean mothers in my Quadruple Bill on Monday, this being the last of my quartet. It was certainly well done and the concept no more barmy than any of the demonic baby tropes, if a bit more up-to-date medically, and there was enough of the claustrophic creepiness that comes with the convent territory and the throwback barbarity of the Church (Spanish Inquisition, anyone?). Apart from the torture porn, a good entry into the genre but, despite Sweeney’s performance, this would not have put her in the break-out league. So I think this will just be put behind her as she charts a new rom-com course. Incidentally, like Anna Hathaway and Jessica Chastain in Mother’s Instinct, she was the producer.

Worth seeing for Sweeney, though, and the clever plot ploy.

American Fiction (2024) *** – Seen at the Cinema

I thought we were in for a treat when our hero is told not to be rude to anyone important. Kick ass, here we go. Nope. Worthy but dull. One part cosmic joke, three parts soap opera, only relieved by the kind of subdued acting that’s become very much the contemporary Oscar-nominated trend (see The Holdovers, Oppenheimer). And with a narrative thrust that is, unfortunately, laughable. I grew up in Glasgow, Scotland, which for generations lived under the cloud of No Mean City, a portrayal of the city as gangster heaven, and we are nothing on what Hollywood did to the Native Americans so, spare me, anyone saying they have been unfairly treated by any part of the media.

Let’s get the soap out of the way first. Monk (Jeffrey Wright) is an out-of-fashion literary novelist eking out a living as a English professor whose students are on the verge of cancelling him. He hives off to the family home where he discovers – discovers! – his mother (Leslie Uggams) is suffering from Alzheimer’s, brother Clifford (Sterling K. Brown) is gay and a coke addict and his sister Lisa (Tracey Ellis Ross) is so ill from heart disease she drops down dead in front of him.

When his latest novel is rejected he decides he will rip off current bestseller Sintara Golden (Issa Rae) and write a book in gangsta patois. Lo and behold it works and what began as him cocking a snook takes on a more serious dimension when he is offered a $750,000 advance. And guess what, suddenly his principles go hang, and not because he’s just a greedy skunk like everyone else but because he’s been handed a get-out-of-jail-free card in that how, otherwise, with a divorced coke addict brother more interested in his latest lover and a dead sister – both I hasten to add high up in the medical profession, sister a consultant, brother a plastic surgeon – is he going to pay for his mother’s care. So he goes along with the gig and the problems multiply as he lives the hypocrisy he claims to abhor.

The idea of someone duping the publishing industry is hardly new. Bestselling British literary author William Boyd sent in a novel under a pseudonym but written in his own style that had attracted a gazillion sales and that was rejected. Polish novelist Jerzy Kosinski sent in one of his own award-winning novels without a word changed and had that rejected. So the publishing industry, like Hollywood and like the media, is just too easy a target unless the weapon is a lot sharper than this.

And hopefully this is a short-lived trope (Argylle went down a similar route), but we see his characters come alive in front of him and play out terrible scenes from his joke fiction.

Yep, so someone is making a point, that Black Literature has lost its way and why can’t Black authors be heralded for writing about ancient Greece (obviously not in your typical blood-sex-and-thunder fashion) or other arcane subjects or even, as shown here, take as their subject matter well-off university-educated rather than poverty-stricken characters and explore their issues (the same as everyone else’s since you’re asking).

Outside of Monk who spends most of the time locked in his head with a bit of light relief with fan-turned-lover Coraline (Erika Alexander), the only person who doesn’t take this stuff seriously is the sister who died too soon, deflating our literary hero by telling him his books come in handy for steadying loose table legs. Debut offering by writer-director Cord Jefferson based on the novel Erasure by Percival Everett.

Kept afloat, just, by Jeffrey Wright (No Time to Die, 2021) mainlining on repression but that’s about it.

The Beekeeper (2024) **** – Seen at the Cinema

A franchise is born. John Wick may or may not rise again, Jason Bourne is dead in the water, so the gap exists. True, the new film certainly riffs on elements of that pair, the retired assassin bare mention of whom elicits fearful reaction, who belongs to a secret government elite, and is jolted into action by someone stupidly preying on the sole beloved aspect of his lonely life.

Eqaully true, Jason Statham (Meg 2, 2023) is certainly viewed in many quarters as the poor man’s Bruce Willis, but, like Liam Neeson, he is one of the few action actors who you would not want to meet in person, on a dark night; he looks as though he growls in his sleep.

*Not an obvious candidate for Imax but then neither was “John Wick 4” and that was certainly an experience in the hi-hat format.*

But it touches on themes that will strike a chord – the data mining to which we all involuntarily subscribe and which governments and villains alike will employ for their own purposes; the computer nerd multi-millionaire; the politically powerful with overly entitled offspring; and those in control who discover not every annoying person can be easily swatted away.

And the beekeeping part turns out also to have meaning, not too much gobbledegook about hives, which is just as well because most people we encounter haven’t a clue how honey is made, least of all pay attention to the intricate structure of that insect’s lifestyle, or that there could be a Queenslayer (and this doesn’t originate from Game of Thrones) whose purpose is to remove a dis-functioning head bee. And just when that metaphor looks as though it’s going to run dry, it turns out to have a deeper meaning.

Just as well, too, that we’re not expecting much finesse from re-awakened assassins. Like John Wick, Adam Clay (Jason Statham) takes no prisoners, but whereas the former confined his murderous activities to the underworld, the latter downs anyone who gets in his way, though in fairness, many of the supposed righteous are in the involuntarily thrall of the country’s justice departments. It helps, too, that F.B.I. investigators, Agents Parker (Emmy Raver-Lampman) and Wiley (Bobby Naderi), while not incompetent, are certainly slovenly and bicker like billy-o, and that Parker is inclined to set aside civil liberties.

So, a scammer steals a couple of million from an elderly woman, who has taken a maternal interest in her beekeeping neighbor. Since she is only caretaker of the cash, which belongs to a charity, in shame she commits suicide. Initially, the number one suspect, Clay has dark forces on his side, too, able to access secret information denied both the F.B.I. and the C.I.A.

And he takes route number one to resolving any issues, turning up at the first scammer operation armed with a couple of cans of petrol and proceeding to drench any employee not smart enough to scarper. That’s, of course, after he’s disabled any security guards so low down the pecking order they wouldn’t even be aware of the name that should strike fear in their hearts.

Luckily, we’ve got retired C.I.A. chief Westwyld (Jeremy Irons) to explain enough about the government’s secret beekeeping operation to keep us on our toes. But quite why he’s involved with said nerdy multi-millionaire Danforth (Josh Hutcherson) is cleverly kept from us until the twists begin to mount. But as in the High Table, he can call in top-level assassins to rid him of an irritant.

There’s some clever comedy, too, as Danforth’s equally geeky underlings don’t quite realize exactly what they’re up against, even while, like gameboys ramping up to participate in a computer game, they hire muscle. But, most of it is Clay daringly outwitting everyone in his path until he ends up at a Presidential hideaway and the extent of the corruption becomes clear.

There’s nothing desperately new here, there rarely is, and scarcely an ounce of sophistication (and who cares about that). Remember that even John Wick (before it developed into the High Table malarkey) was a bare-bones riff on Bourne. But who needs anything that original, a believable character is all, because there will always be murk that needs cleaned up, and a hero who can take on all-comers. John Wick One, as I recall, was not such a big initial blockbuster, finding a bigger audience on DVD, and it was only when the makers went back to the well, with a bigger budget and expanded the concept, that it really took off.

I can see the same thing happening here. The big surprise of the weekend was not so much the heavily-promoted Mean Girls doing better than expected, but the scarcely-promoted The Beekeeper doing way better than expected, and when it comes to the foreign markets, the latter will blow the former out of the water, because, overseas, action speaks louder than lyrics.

Not entirely sure why this is so heavily pickled with Brits, but as well as Statham, we have Oscar-winner Jeremy Irons (House of Gucci, 2001) with his silky steely tones, Jemma Redgrave (I’ll Be There, 2003) in her biggest movie role in two decades and Minnie Driver (Chevalier, 2002) as a hard-nosed slinkily-dressed top cat. I can see all three returning as the series develops.

I’ve a sneaky feeling the role of Parker, grieving daughter going all kick ass, was edited down as it became apparent Statham was going to kick all the ass any audience would need, but Emmy Raver-Lampman (graduating from still-running The Umbrella Academy TV series) brings a good dose of authenticity to the part, avoiding the usual glam-potential-rom set-up.

It’s in very capable hands, director David Ayer bringing a Fury (2014) directness to proceedings rather than being swamped all-ways-up by character overload as in The Suicide Squad (2016). Kurt Zimmer (Salt, 2010) has all the correct experience to layer this with more than eternal action beats.

Let’s hear it for the bee-busters.