Hold on to your honey, because The Beekeeper (2024) is the Greatest Movie EVER!
Click on the movie poster or the title above to download our review of the film, featuring Tom “Finalfuryk” Pandich.
Review in a Nutshell: An over-the-top action movie with hilariously retrograde politics, The Beekeeper (2024) is nonetheless a tremendously entertaining film.
The Greatest Movie EVER! Podcast 
I highly adored The Beekeeper, though the vibe I got from it wasn’t quite “this is ultra retrograde/reactionary” so much as “this is Kurt Wimmer of Ultraviolet and Equilibrium fame trying to weave a narrative that threads the needle by appealing to as much of the United States political spectrum as possible.” The solution he came up with was to pattern the villains after people like Martin Shkreli or Logan/Jake Paul who are despised bipartisanly. The political figure characters are all amalgamations of high-profile Democrats with Republicans; since he presumably didn’t know whether Trump or Clinton would be elected, his ultra powerful politican character is both Trump and Clinton at once. The success of this approach was perhaps out of The Wimmer’s hands, given who was cast for what kind of roles.
The main tell for me was the casting of the call center tech bros (and I must say, it’s a good thing those call centers are all within reasonable driving distance). Were The Beekeeper approaching its subject matter from a more intentionally partisan perspective, the call center employees wouldn’t all be looking like extras from The Wolf of Wall Street. They’d be predominantly Eastern European / South Asian.
I always interpreted the scene in John Wick 2 where characters spend a Continental Coin on a single drink when said single coin is the cost of disposing of a human corpse not as the mark of an ill-thought economy, but as people flexing their relative wealth: top assassins have amassed so many coins that they can effectively throw them away as an intimidation tactic. The Beekeeper made an outlandish amount of money, and so the inevitable sequel will presumably follow a similar escalation.
Paul, you called this the most retrograde movie you ever saw. Does this mean you never saw John Millus’s RED DAWN?
This movie is about as “all-American” as one of those South Korean T-shirts with F-16s and guns and American flags on it. it is so clearly a non-American’s view of what America must be like that the only thing missing was a gas guzzling car and a double double-decker Quarter Pounder… weighed down with American cheese.
I think Daryl Surat may have the right of it here, that the villains were made to be equally hateable for both Left and Right. They even cast Jeremy Irons, Uncle Scar himself from THE LION KING, as the former head of the CIA!
Just ignore the middle paragraph of my last comment given. I’ve already said it three other times!