Jason Statham Leads Absurd John Wick Ripoff

Here’s the beautiful thing about David Ayer’s “The Beekeeper,” which is essentially a “John Wick” ripoff starring Jason Statham as a former top-secret government assassin who violently unretires after someone kills his bees: If for some twisted reason you showed me this movie right after I’d woken up from a 10-year coma and told me it was opening in theaters that Friday, I might not have any idea what year I was in, but I would know — within five minutes, and beyond a shadow of a doubt — that it was the second weekend of January. 

Too silly for late August, too memorable for streaming (Statham only has about 12 lines in this film, and one of them is “I’d like to thank you for putting up with me and my bees”), and so committed to its own stupidity that it starts to feel like smart counter-programming for prestige fare like “Poor Things” and “American Fiction,” “The Beekeeper” could reorient a lost critic to their current place in the film calendar as reliably as the North Star might point a wayward sailor back to port. For me, there’s a strange comfort in that. For you, well, there’s a phenomenal scene in which Statham kills the world’s most annoying henchman by tethering him to a pickup truck and then launching the truck off a bridge at full speed.

By February, that might not be enough to move the needle, and the audacity of the big plot reveal that it tees up — a truly delightful bit of world-building that I…