Let’s start the year off with the new Jason Staham movie, The Beekeeper.
One merry day, a kindly but tech “un-savvy” old lady is scammed by one of those “call this number to recover your computer” operations, resulting in them draining all her money, even the 2 millions of the pro-bono teaching fund she was tasked with.
In utter despair, she commits suicide, and her daughter, working at the FBI, initially thinks is the man whom she found in her house, but he was simply her neighbour, a quiet man that worked as a beekeeper and was beyond grateful of the kindness bestowed upon him by the old lady.
So he sets out in a quest for revenge against those responsable, because he’s a beekeeper, but also a “beekeeper”, as the codename given to highly trained assassins, one-man army agents belonging to a super-secret government project, operating outside of the system to protect the system itself in case it becomes unstable or operated by bad actors.
Some very bad actors in this case, not that will stop Jason Staham to avenge her kindly neighbour by kicking ass, eventually crushing skulls and popping caps into anything that doesn’t wanna de-escalate scamming people, when the sheer magnitude of his one liners somehow doesn’t immediately scare the life out of the douchebag thugs and their untouchable masters.
It’s a decent action romp with some nice ideas that ultimately delivers a lot of satisfying graphic violence, the plot it’s essentially nothing new but the flair (and the “bee angle”) is nice enough, the action is enjoyably cheesy, and it’s a pretty straighforward narrative that doesn’t wast time nor tries to sequel bait.
It’s definitely better than most of the other movies Staham was in last year, this is decent, and very, very entertaining indeed.
It’s a drought in every way, so let’s go the ol’ content mill to see what garbage TV disaster movie we can fish out from Amazon Prime Video and it’s ever so unreliable availability of old stuff that now is included with the Prime membership, now isn’t available anymore, or is it but if you subscribe to another channel/service for 8 bucks a month, so sod it, let’s see a random pick from my list which is available for “free”, and if nothing else there’s plenty of these disaster movies to chew through on the service. So i’m kinda glad we didn’t land on one of the Asylum one with this dice throw.
Nope, we’re going back to the late 90s, on the verge of the 2000s being a thing and the Y2K scare was being throttled, with all the bullshit it produced, but it was simpler times as you could make disaster movie about “just” tsunami without the need of a hook like crystal meth spiders hiding under the tectonic plates so now we have swarms of drug spiders being spread by the tidal waves.
Predictably, Tidal Wave: No Escape, directed by George Miller (not that one, despite this George Miller also having a history of directing children movies with/about animals) is about tsunami happening out of the blue (pun) in various american coasts, which forces the usual unwilling “scientist in hiding/ritire” to touch grass and try to make sense of the phenomenon, revealing that he did study a method to artificially create tidal waves, so he gets suspected but then a mysterious voice calls them to inform that the killer waves will happen again, and again and again.
Is Poseidon itself treathening mankind? Will the dumbass army men figure out he’s obviously not the protagonist scientist behind this? Will he form a bond that will bloom into romance with the female scientist that initially thought explosions or meteors were behind the tsunamis?
In terms of plot or characters there’s nothing we haven’t seen before, but even if mostly stereotyped (the dickwad head honcho who is convinced the hero is actually the villain because of petty jealousy, also present in the variant of the more fair and impartial but also incredibly dense black officer whom isn’t as lucky as the dickwad boss), the characters are ok, the acting is decent enough, and surprisingly the effects are not too bad looking today.
Sure, they have certainly aged and are obvious by today’s standards, but this one came before widespread use of cheap digital effects, which are maybe used twice for minor things, so they have to make the waves hitting look real the old fashion way, and for a TV movie of the era it does a respectable job, given the limitations and not having much in terms of “cinematic scope” for spectacle. Again, it was indeed what one could expect for this type of production in that decade.
And to my surprise, Tidal Wave: No Escape it’s actually not bad, not bad at all, the balance between drama and the conspiracy plot is actually nice, and direction is strong especially in the first half, sadly after the mid point and the reveal of a character’s true motivations, the narrative kinda turns into a more typical and a bit too old school action-disaster movie stuffed with boring or filler-ish dialogues so the villain can say something before the climax and some dumb conversations can be had, even thought by this point you won’t really care much about and are just waiting for things to finally unfold as you’d expect they would (and they do).
It’s definitely a naive and kinda outdated relic of its time, especially as you can date it just by how the “hacking” and rudimentary database rummagign is done via old DOS computers on the respectively old timey computer screens not brimming with many colors, but honestly that’s kinda cute to see today, and overall the movie manages to be respectable, enjoyable despite its flaws , which surprisingly do not lie in aged special effects, more in a bloated third act and a fairly thin plot, but it doesn’t bore the viewer with excessive and tiresome pseudo science exposition dumps, plus it does its job with some dignity despite the overall result being just above mediocrity, and that alone is more than one could have expected to say of a 1997 TV disaster movie about tidal waves.
Wise Cafe (International) 