Night Swim (2024) should not be paid for

If you would have told me that the movie about a swimming pool that eats people would be boring, I probably would have believed you. I still would have watched it because I love a high concept silly premise and enjoy horror enough to devour any weird flick that makes it to theaters. Night Swim does no favors to the cast, crew, or even the B movie premise and might as well have been about a toilet.

     Looking for a home after a diagnosis that ends his baseball career, Ray Waller moves his family into a house with a cool pool out back. The Wallers love their new home and start to put down roots, but it turns out the spring that fills with pool is full of evil that promises greatness if only it has a sacrifice. Cue possessions and pain that can only come from the idea "what if the Amityville Horror house had a pool?"

     The cast here is fine. Somebody needs to get Wyatt Russell a better agent because he is better than most things he has been a part of. Kerry Condon plays his wife Eve damn well, and I loved her in The Banshees of Inisherin last year. Round out the cast with an angsty teen girl (Hoeferle) who wants a boyfriend and a wide-eyed kid (Warren) who wants to live until his 12th birthday, and this family is believable as a unit. Any other drama and these four would have killed it. Every other supporting role is enjoyable and fun yet the product they find themselves in is not at all.

     The problem seems to come with tone. This should have been a horror comedy the way the cast plays it at times. There's menace here, especially when the evil begins to take hold, yet instead of The Shining we get Days of Our Lives. When Jack Torrence says "gimme the bat" to Wendy on the stairs, we feel like he's toying with her. When Ray tells his daughter "Baby, we already got help" as the pool is eating her brother, it's just silly. And that's okay, but it feels like what we are supposed to feel (dread) is being superseded by what we are seeing (wackiness).

      The background of family trouble and the pool lies at the center of the tonal problem. I cared for the family (due to the acting, see above) and wanted them to be challenged. Yet rather than follow the drama, the plot about the evil pool needed to be adhered to so we get a wacky pool guy and a ditzy real estate agent leading to a confrontation that falls flat because that idea is the afterthought. Sure, the family drama ties into evil with dad's illness being slowly cured by the water. He wants something and will sacrifice to get it, but only because the water makes him. But evil water does not a good villain make. By the time we get the full reveal, it's too late. The monster is just the water. The family do not bind themselves together after being divided to triumph. They just make it out because the movie was about to be over, and it ran out of story.

     I did not hate this movie. It was disappointing. Wait for this one to hit streaming if you want to see it, but save your theater cash for something more fun or dramatic or just interesting.

The Beekeeper (2024) should be watched at home

Beekeeping is a sacred art that I have only attempted during one playthrough of Stardew Valley. From what I understand, you cultivate a hive of insects that wish to kill you one and all and in return you get honey. In the world of Jason Statham, you protect society and those that are most vulnerable by destroying systems of oppression one can of gasoline at a time.

Statham plays The Beekeeper (with some general name like Max American Man, I forget, but BK from now on because I'm lazy), a retired covert murder machine who likes to relax in the country living a quiet life with his bees and friend Claire Huxtable. When Claire is scammed out of millions of dollars through a phishing scam and kills herself, BK takes it upon himself to murder everyone connected with the scam, burn down their buildings, and salt the earth with the tears of their loved ones. It's a hoot.

Part of the fun of the movie is the frantic and violent nature of this otherwise stupid John Wick knockoff. Our near silent protagonist stomps his way through mob-like assholes with ease. In one particularly good scene, a barn becomes a house of horrors right out of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Another assault on an office building shows a pretty creative use of an elevator to dispatch a man in a way that would make Jason Voorhees slow clap. Good thing we are still rooting for the killer.

There's very little "acting" from Statham. Not to say the man is not fun to watch, and these stunts are impressive as hell from a man proven to be fun to watch beating nine hells out of Fast and/or Furious on any given day, but growling your way through each encounter leaves a lot of nuance on the floor. To compare (which we should not, but we are), Keanu Reeves's John Wick had moments of grief and silent fury reflecting the death of his wife and dog in a rampage that left him battered and bloody until the next movie. The script gives BK little to work with but righteous anger. It's pretty spot on, though, and I applaud him for it.

The surrounding cast can be hit and miss as well. They all do a fine job if only for the script. Emmy Raver-Lampman and Bobby Naderi do a fine job as the FBI agents attempting to make sense of the carnage, kinda odd when it was Raver-Lampman's mom who got scammed that started all this. That they have to be reminded often "this man is an elite killer from a murder program so hardcore it murdered its way out of history" makes them bumbling, though. They get a few hero moments, but mostly follow the carnage and explain to us what we already know.

The villains are at the same time memorable but forgettable. At the top of the food chain are Jeremy Irons getting that house payment check and Josh Hutcherson having fun acting as the biggest asshole in the world. The rest are either a sea of mooks with destiny dates with elevators or mid-level scam operators that work more like scenes from Wolf of Wall Street. It's fun but forgettable to watch them all die. Well, there's one more, Jemma Redgrave crushing it at the end with an actual sincere bit of acting that felt out of place in this "root for the monster" movie.

In the end, The Beekeeper is a solid "I'm too hungover to change the channel" action flick. I miss these types of movies, the kind that played on HBO or edited on TBS in the middle of the day to fill time until something more prestigious could be played. Just a chunky little action movie that will stop you from yawning so you can go to bed at a reasonable hour.