The Beekeeper shocked me twice. First, it’s exactly as silly as it needs to be. Then it turns outrageous. Jason Statham plays Adam Clay, a man who loves his beehives. We watch him gracefully slice a honeycomb, extracting jars of liquid sweet. A burst of violent revenge reveals this unassuming beekeeper was once chief mega-killer for a clandestine government operation known as, yes, the Beekeepers. The villains he strangles, impales, and explodes are scammers conning money from baffled old folks. They prey on grandmas. They mess with Phylicia Rashad.
She is Clay’s kind landlord, Eloise, a lifelong educator who manages “a charity for kids.” When her money disappears into the offshore crypto-cloud, she puts a bullet in her own heart. Clay finds the shady call center that robbed her, and beats up the SPAM artists with their own telephones. He also brings gas cans.
If you haven’t been a victim of phishing, you’ve been a target. We all will be, every day, until we die. Or anyhow, that paranoid feeling makes me the right old age for Beekeeper’s fightback fantasy. Josh Hutcherson sweats ketamine as Derek Danforth, an evil data tycoon who takes sonic baths. Hutcherson is 31 playing 28, whereas Statham has played a cynical retired something-or-other this whole century. So Beekeeper’s initial thrills are vicarious, surely age-dependent. Screenwriter Kurt Wimmer also co-wrote the heinous Expend4bles, which only peaked when Lee Christmas beat an influencer. Wimmer’s cornered this market: Statham Punches Internet.
A bigger surprise waits in the final act. Jason Statham does not unzip his human suit to reveal a giant queen bee. The Beekeeper never calls “Buzz, Buzz, Buzzz, Buzzzzzz” to his beloved bees in a moment of crisis. The guffaw-inducing twist is, I promise, only 12% less lunatic. A rare solid Statham movie becomes, dare I say it, about America in 2024. It’s so ludicrous that the rest is a letdown. You’re ready for the voltage to crank high right as things turn Mechanical.
Insufficient insanity is a specific Statham-movie problem. There have always been tough guys who reveal no emotion, by choice or necessity. His deadpan came off surreal, though, arriving right as action movies turned carnivalesque and cartoon. He rode crosswaves of advancing CGI, music-video chaos editing, the martial-arts vogue, broseph lad-mag amorality. On the recent Transporter draft of the Screen Drafts Patreon, Commissioner Clay Keller made the excellent case that Statham’s first franchise perfectly tracks the action genre’s 2000s evolution. The bigger blockbusters back then cast heroes for awe or self-awareness: Matt Damon suffering geopolitical sins, Johnny Depp swanning cheeky through cannonball runs. Whereas when Frank Martin upjumped a borrowed jetski to a freeway chasing Transporter 2’s Russian on a schoolbus, Statham’s complete lack of facial expression seemed less cool than psychopathic.
The magnificent Crank duet made him a human piñata. The Beekeeper never risks that level of torture for its star-producer. But here’s the first film in awhile to meet Statham’s freeze-mugged sourness with appropriate hysteria. Jeremy Irons plays Derek’s chief enforcer, Wallace, who is the former director of the CIA. He uses his government connections against Clay, while FBI agent Verona Parker (Emmy Raver-Lampman) hunts him for personal reasons. She is, in fact, Eloise’s grieving daughter. That direct emotional connection is too much, in a script corner-cut enough to suggest this billion-dollar globo-scam has its key offices all within driving distance. But it’s fun watching Verona and her partner Agent Wiley (hangdog-hilarious Bobby Naderi) arrive in the Beekeeper’s constant wake, every burnt-out crime scene full of unusual corpses.
I hate bees. They started it. Last summer they got me three separate times. With me and bees it’s Jaws 4 now. Like, generational. They stung my dad. They stung my kid. Everyone is allowed to root for one environmental calamity, and I say burn ‘em all. (The New York Times’ recent “whoops you idiots with urban hives are killing Earth” investigation was drink-your-tears validating.) I don’t mind when people talk about bees, though, and Beekeeper has only good bee talk. One predatory Phisherman insults Clay: “Beelover!” he says, “Bee boy!” When Verona first meets the strange man holding a honey jar by her dead mom’s corpse, she blurts: “Who the fuck are you, Winnie-the-Pooh?” The bees are a metaphor, by the way. Jeremy Irons earns his paycheck telling henchmen, quote, “Our nation is not unlike a beehive.”
Director David Ayer finds a delicate rampage mode, extreme yet amused by extremity. Beekeeper gets worse when you remember the lived-in texture of his earlier work. His screenplay for Training Day and critical co-scripting on The Fast and the Furious and S.W.A.T. led to Ayer directing Street Kings and End of Watch. Levels of violent intensity, operatic dudery, bracing cynicism sandwiching mawkish sentiment, bad cops reveling in “Rodney King shit,” angel police Grail Knighting hope from the urban quagmire, stereotypical monster criminals alongside sensitive multicultural striving. A decade building his own Movie Los Angeles.
Beekeeper has more in common with Ayer’s Sabotage, a macho murder mystery whose upcoming tenth anniversary will be celebrated massively by this publication. That dark-as-death comedy found Arnold Schwarzenegger leading a self-destructive DEA crew. Imagine Predator without the Predator, just a ‘roidy warrior mentality eating itself alive. The Beekeeper embraces a parallel national-security swirl, the FBI and CIA pinballing off Seal Team vets and ultra-classified assassins. But where Sabotage went over the edge, Beekeeper’s last act doesn’t sting like it should. Still, cheese rarely tastes this sweet.
Grade: 🐝🐝🐝