The Beekeeper Review

Jason Statham seems to play the same man in every film. Each new role is separated more by his hobbies than by his name. In the FastSaga, he likes expensive cars. In The Meg, he likes deep-sea diving and ecoterrorism. In The Expendables franchise, he likes knives. He is otherwise the same quippy, unflappable, superhuman killing machine in every outing. In The Beekeeper, he has elevated both his hobby-based characterization and the concept of the dad action movie to new levels of comical schlock.

David Ayer's story is tragic. He wrote Training Day before directing the stellar action thrillers End of Watch and Fury. His career plummeted after he took over Suicide Squad, followed by his work on the utterly insufferable Bright. He has suffered a fall on the level of M. Night Shyamalan with far less compelling results. His 2020 film, The Tax Collector, moved the needle by remaining merely bad. The Beekeeper is mediocre, so fans should cross their fingers that he may eventually slap his name on a decent film again.

Jason Statham To Play A Beekeeper In Upcoming Miramax Thriller

Jason Statham will take his penchant for compelling action heroes to a new occupation in a new Miramax thriller aptly titled The Bee Keeper.

The Beekeeper delivers a premise that almost sounds strange enough to be compelling. Jason Statham portrays Adam Clay, a taciturn apiarist renting barn space from a retired teacher. His host, Phylicia Rashad pulling the old sitcom mom routine out of retirement, falls for a classic phishing scheme and loses all her money. She swiftly takes her own life, sending Clay on a quest for vengeance. Clay turns out to be a retired agent of a black ops group called the Beekeepers, rendering him functionally immortal. Whether he found the hobby or the non-governmental super soldier program first is left to the imagination. The script bubbles with righteous anger at the financial criminals who swindle the elderly out of their hard-earned savings. It's almost cathartic to watch the perpetrators of the modern grift economy suffer Statham's wrath as if he's an avenging angel. Statham's character repeatedly states his philosophy, comparing society to a beehive and declaring himself the "queen-killer" who will set right the top of the hive. Its political wisdom frustratingly starts and stops with "Don't mistreat the elderly."

There is a fascinating narrative buried in The Beekeeper. A hero of the people, a living embodiment of America's collective disgust at the rich scamming the poor out of the pennies they've saved, but it can't carry its concept through its narrative. The phishing scam is the ground level of an all-consuming conspiracy tied to the highest levels of American power. Josh Hutcherson pops up as the sniveling Silicon Valley man-child at the top, paying Jeremy Irons' ex-CIA director to keep him safe. This would be wonderful, but the film stumbles into the usual "bad apples" argument. It could have railed against every facet of society, picked apart human nature, and assailed them with Statham's righteous violence routine until the audience was standing in their seats and calling for regime change. Instead, Clay picks the bad bees out of the hive and leaves the world as it is. Without any incisive critique, the justified anger in the first act feels like a personal grievance. Did writer Kurt Wimmer's parents lose their savings to some cons in a call center?

Outside the missed messaging, The Beekeeper delivers a straightforward action thriller. Its violence is competently captured but never inspiring. Statham knows what he's doing because he's done it around 50 times. The presentation lacks surprise and panache. The sound department deserves praise they'll rarely receive for selling moments of dull shooting or punching with bone-rattling booms. Anyone could cut out any scene from The Beekeeper and slip it into a different Statham movie without others noticing a difference. There is, however, a bizarre problem in the film's escalation. Irons' character brings in three discrete antagonists to kill Statham, but each lasts around five minutes before he adds them to the pile. Irons even sends another Beekeeper after Statham, selling her as an unhinged wildcard before she dies in her first and only scene. Picking one primary threat might have streamlined the affair and added the slightest hint of the possibility that Statham could be in any meaningful danger.

The most fascinating element of The Beekeeper is its place in the dad action movie craze. Statham is 56 and far from the oldest star keeping the flame alive. The target audience for most of his projects is older gentlemen who spend a lot of time thinking about how they'd handle a home invasion or terrorist attack. The "we've still got it" market remains all-powerful in the genre. In The Beekeeper, Ayer and Wimmer seem to offer them two promises. Through Statham, they promise that they could still be a hero. Through Rashad, they argue that their suffering is the greatest tragedy on Earth. They state that mistreating an old person is inherently worse than abusing a child before delivering a hundred versions of Statham punching twenty-somethings. Combined with its refusal to criticize systems over individuals, it comes across as oddly outdated.

Bees have an oddly cursed legacy in film. From Bee Movie to The Wicker Man, something about these striped insects plays weirdly well in the meme hive mind and oddly terribly on the big screen. Like Nic Cage's performance in Wicker Man, The Beekeeper's few moments of entertaining madness fail to compensate for its overall inadequacy. It sits squarely in the middle of recent action offerings. The fact that no one dies from bee stings in this movie is an almost comical failure.