'The Beekeeper' has some sting

 The Beekeeper is one of those movies that hardly needs reviewing. If you don't know who Jason Statham is, you probably aren't interested in his latest hunk of kick-ass entertainment. If you do know Statham (Expend4bles, Fast X) you probably have a good idea about The Beekeeper before you see it. 

   This time, Statham portrays Adam Clay, a lover of bees. But Adam's role as an apiarist proves secondary to his commitment to dispensing justice. 

   The Beekeepers, you see, are a no-holds-barred group of agents that's so secret even the head of the CIA may not  know about them. When all else fails, The Beekeepers -- well-trained killing machines -- are called in to clean up the mess. 

   Director David Ayer (Suicide Squad, Fury) works around a slender plot in which Adam, a retired Beekeeper, sets out to avenge a wrong committed by a heartless creep (Josh Hutcherson) who owns call centers dedicated to scamming  the elderly out of their savings. 

  Hutcherson's Derek Danforth makes the mistake of stealing from Eloise Parker (Phylicia Rashad), Adam's kindly landlord. Distraught about her loss, she commits suicide. Adam's onslaught begins.

   An unashamedly ridiculous plot finds Eloise's daughter (Emmy Raver-Lampman), an FBI agent, searching for  Adam as a variety of others join her in pursuit.

   Jeremy Irons plays a former head of the CIA who has been hired to protect the callous Derek from himself and others. 

  None of this much matters; Statham's unrelieved determination and the creativity Ayer brings to the movie's violent encounters count far more than common sense. 

  For about three-quarters of its one hour and 45 minute running time, The Beekeeper serves up the right amount of sting but the trouble with such movies is that they tend to wear out their welcome. They make their points early and often.

  Oh well, it's January. The Beekeeper may lack the aplomb of a John Wick movie, but it's a well-stuffed filler for fans who like their movie violence served with over-the-top relish.

Super villains invade the summer

Lots of action, no real traction in Suicide Squad.

Into the endless flow of comic-book movies comes Suicide Squad, the latest entry from DC Comics to hit the nation's multiplexes. Cluttered and chaotic, the movie tells an inconsequential story about a group of super baddies who are recruited to fight evil.

There may not be 12 of them, but Suicide Squad functions as a kind of Dirty Dozen of the comic-book world, taking on a supposedly desperate moment when Superman isn't around, and Batman operates on the crime-fighting fringe; i.e., Ben Affleck has a cameo.

Heavily promoted and cast for cash, Suicide Squad does a reasonably good job of introducing its characters -- with featured work from Will Smith, Margot Robbie, and Viola Davis.

Too bad the movie eventually turns into a muddle that pits our heroic villains against a powerfully angry witch who wants to ... er .... well ... wreak havoc.

Suicide Squad advances an idea that isn't exactly novel, something about fighting fire with fire. Adopting a strictly business attitude, Davis plays the government official who decides that there's only one way to combat a villain that has invaded the subways of an American metropolis called Midway City. She assembles a task force of equally malicious combatants.

The movie's much seen trailer and its strong opening scenes ignite hope for an adventure in which Col. Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman) will try to control the unruly misfits who must be released from imprisonment to form Task Force X; a.k.a., the Suicide Squad.

There's Headshot, a crack marksman played by Smith; the beautiful, crazy and scantily clad Harley Quinn (Robbie); and Diablo (Jay Hernandez), a tattooed character who shoots flames from his fingertips.

Diablo's uncontrollable temper has led him to commit a monstrous act. He attacked his wife and kids, a foul deed that seems too malignant even for a comic-book movie that wants to take its evil seriously.

About that evil: Let's just say that The Enchantress, the witch played by Cara Delevingne, fails to work her way into the ranks of indelible comic-book antagonists.

Other members of the Suicide Squad include Killer Croc (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), a reptilian creature who's at home in sewers; Boomerang (Jai Courtney), an Aussie assassin who takes out his opponents with (what else?) a boomerang; Slipknot (Adam Beach), a man with climbing skills; and Katana (Tatsu Yamashiro), who's skilled with a sword and pretty much an afterthought in the overall proceedings.

And while we're on the subject of afterthoughts: The movie also features an appearance by The Joker (Jared Leto). Metal teeth and maniacal laughter don't make The Joker as wild as the movie might have hoped.

The Joker's around mostly to work his evil ways on Harley. Once a psychiatrist at Arkham Asylum, Harley has been turned into a bat-wielding maniac and sex toy by the Joker.

Lots of blurry and over-extended action alternates with scenes that give members of the Suicide Squad a chance to deliver snide dialogue, but audiences that compare Suicide Squad to Deadpool (a far more successful take on good/bad guys), likely will be disappointed.

Director David Ayer (Fury, End of Watch) may have the chops for a comic book movie, but he has written a darkly hued script with little capacity to wink at its well-worn genre and a story that builds toward a second-rate display of pyrotechnics. Get the point? Suicide Squad just isn't much good.

Stuck in the mud of war

Brad Pitt leads a tank crew in a movie full of harrowing war imagery.

By April of 1945, U.S. troops had advanced deep into German territory. For Germany, the war already was lost. Humiliation and surrender loomed.

Despite being set on the eve of the impending Allied triumph, the mood of director David Ayer's Fury remains forbidding and dark. Seldom has victory looked quite this grim.

If there's freshness in Ayer's approach, it's found just here: It doesn't really matter whether soldiers are fighting on the first or last day of a war: Many will die. Brutality doesn't stop just because the end is near.

The opening image of Ayer's movie has a haunting, nearly surreal quality. A German soldier rides a white horse onto an open field. We don't know where the soldier's headed or why he's on horse back.

Seconds later, a lone figure springs from a U.S. tank. Don "Wardaddy" Collier (Brad Pitt) leaps on the German officer, pulls him off his horse and stabs him to death.

In one image, Ayer vanquishes any thoughts we might have had about the romance of war.

Fury offers lots more unsettling imagery, sights presumably intended to make us see the war with fresh eyes, to absorb its intensity and fear in ways that we haven't yet experienced. To say Fury has a kind of bleak power may sound like a turn-off, but that's precisely what we're supposed to feel with a movie such as this.

Pitt's performance as an Army sergeant in charge of a war-weary tank crew inevitably will remind audiences of the character he played in Inglourious Basterds, but Pitt's Collier is more complex than Lt. Aldo Raine.

A hardened veteran, Collier parcels out his human impulses sparingly, almost as if he's afraid of tapping out an already depleted supply.

The rest of Collier's crew consists of Boyd "Bible" Swan (Shia LaBeouf), Trini "Gordo" Garcia (Michael Pena) and Grady "Coon Ass" Travis (John Bernthal). Scott Eastwood portrays Sergeant Miles, another member of the crew.

The plot -- hardly a groundbreaker -- begins when a newbie (Logan Lerman) joins Collier's tank crew in what seems a desperate or possibly haphazard move by the Army.

Lerman's Norman Ellison has spent most of the war as a clerk typist. He has no tank training, and makes a reluctant warrior, someone whose unwillingness to kill is seen as a threat by his comrades in arms.

Much of the story involves the ways in which Lerman's character is toughened -- at first against his will and later with vengeful relish.

In Ayer's world, the members of the tank crew are bonded, but they're not always admirable. Bernthal's Travis can seem like a borderline sadist. So does Collier, at times.

The point, of course, is that the savagery of war tends to turn men into brutes regardless of what uniform they happen to be wearing.

The actors all mold their performances to fit the dreary, mud-soaked landscapes that become another character in the hands of cinematographer Roman Vasyanov.

The movie offers up equal amounts of combat and desperation, although there's an interlude in which Collier and Ellison enter the apartment of a couple of German women (Anamaria Marinca and Alicia von Rittberg). The soldiers are in a town that just has been taken. Some of them are looking for sex and spoils.

At first, the scene humanizes Collier, but there's a terrible, growing tension when the rest of the tank crew shows up, wondering why they've been excluded from what appears to be a moment's pleasure and respite.

Ayer made his cinematic bones with viscerally charged movies such as End of Watch, which focused on cops in South Central Los Angeles. He makes full use of his talent for violent immediacy here, bringing it to scene-after-scene.

Fury also reminds us that shocking sights can become routine if seen in abundance: Dead bodies are flatted by tank treads, and the ugliness of war unfolds under dark, apprehensive skies.

The movie's finale involves a terrible battle in which Collier's crew (unbelievably, I think) decides to face an entire SS battalion, a decision that's tantamount to a death sentence. Is it courage or a death wish from soldiers who know they'll never again adjust to normal life? Will anyone survive?

When stripped of all its grim atmospherics, Fury may not seem radically different from lots of other war movies that follow small groups of men into the teeth of war.

But story arc may not be the point here: Ayer seems to be trying to give us a more vividly disturbing picture than the one sometimes associated with the so-called Greatest Generation.

With hindsight, idealism may be possible. On the battlefield, it's a forgotten luxury.