“For someone who has elevated fucking up into an artform, this might well be your Mona Lisa.”
The Beekeeper has a pretty solid pedigree as far as it goes. Director David Ayer (End of Watch, Fury), star Jason Statham (The Wrath of Man, Death Race, The Italian Job), writer Kurt Vimmer (Equilibrium, Law Abiding Citizen, Salt)—these guys have made solid action films. Not necessarily films with big brains or tender hearts, but stuff that’s worth watching. Good forgettable fun. And that’s an important point to realize: The Beekeeper has no complex thematic intentions, it doesn’t aspire to be a genre classic, it isn’t fussy about excessively artsy compositions or layered characterizations. It’s just a tough guy action flick and it embraces and commits to the limits of that simple aspiration.
Statham plays a beekeeper who also happens to be a former Beekeeper, i.e. a lethal black ops doesn’t-officially-exist walking weapon who knows all the tricks and can kill a man with one finger or even by just scowling at him, a hyperbolic self-parody of Statham’s action star persona that gives him another unique occupation that also codes him as a killing machine (The Transporter, The Mechanic). Vimmer’s screenplay never really clarifies if this is a clandestine, corrective arm of the government’s security apparatus or an ancient line of enforcers in the lineage of the Order of Assassins or the Priory of Scion.
The stoic beekeeper’s kind landlady (Phylicia Rashad) falls for a phishing scam, and because she ran a charity whose $2M account got zeroed out and couldn’t live with the crushing shame, she kills herself. Her daughter (Emmy Raver-Lampman) is an FBI agent who wants to mete out justice by the book with her buddy cop work husband (Bobby Naderi). Statham sees things differently. And so he comes out of retirement, goes berserk, slings punches and lead and bee puns with abandon (“To bee or not to bee?”), and incidentally exposes a huge political scandal that involves a former CIA director (Jeremy Irons) and the entitled son (Josh Hutcherson) of the President of the United States (Jemma Redgrave). It’s almost a slasher film at times—gruesome kills without any fighting beforehand, but then there’s plenty of grappling and punching and stabbing too.
The moral is obvious, the plot straightforward, the cast fully invested in the calculated witlessness of the screenplay. One wishes the FBI agents were given less time so the villains might not be so diluted, but that’s a minor complaint. Ultimately, the film’s success relies entirely on the excitement generated by its scenarios and the comprehensible execution of the action. In this it mostly excels, giving the eternally lethal Statham the opportunity to burn down a neon boiler room full of yuppie thieves, send a techbro (David Witts) off a bridge tied to a junker minus a few phalanges, crisp an assassin (Megan Le) at a gas station, duke it out with a punk caveman (Taylor James), booby trap an elevator, hang a mercenary, and infiltrate a beachside mansion under the nose of the Secret Service. He uses guns, but not as often as John Wick—a mini franchise that might serve as a model if they want to make some buzzworthy sequels. If they do, hopefully things remain as comparatively grounded as they are here. If they don’t, the trio of Ayers, Wimmer, and Statham could at least make a few more films together.