The Beekeeper is a tried-and-true formula executed with punch

The Beekeeper is a tried-and-true formula executed with punch

If you look at the poster for The Beekeeper, you will see an image of Jason Statham surrounded by bees, scowling like he’s about to fuck up a bunch of people. One would hope, based on this image, that the film tells the story of a sentient swarm of bees that can form themselves into a surly Englishman to fight crime. One would expect, however, based on a long history of movies, that it tells the tale of a man with a certain set of skills who has been pushed to his limit and must now dish out justice.

This second plot supposition is the correct one, and as such, I think I have a script to sell you. It’s about a sentient swarm of bees that can form themselves into a surly Englishman to fight crime. I would love for it to star Jason Statham. 

Not on the poster, which uses hexagons instead of the letter O, in reference to the shape of honeycombs, is the tagline “Get Stung.” How a movie called The Beekeeper didn’t utilize such a simple, effective line is well beyond me. I should do slogans for a living. But alas, that’s not my job, so instead I’m going to spend the next few hundred words telling you that you should throw down a little bit of your hard-earned money to see David Ayer’s latest. It’s about the dumbest script ever made into a movie, but Ayer and his team seem to know this, and instead of treating it all with a wink and nod, they smartly choose to play it straight. Statham growls and scowls as he violently dispatches a bunch of bitchboi bitcoin baddies, while a badass cop lady is hot on his trail, looking for a reason to derail his train of violent justice, and failing to find one that jibes with her morals.

The film begins with the silliest bit of exposition. Adam Clay (Statham) is a beekeeper. He keeps his hives on a piece of property rented to him by Eloise Parker (Phylicia Rashad), the “only person who ever took care” of him. It’s his last day or something, so Eloise invites him into her home for dinner. In the hours preceding the meal, she falls victim to a phishing scam that drains not just her personal accounts, but that of a charity she manages. In a state of despair she takes her own life, and now Adam Clay, The Beekeeper, is going to kill everybody involved with the scam, up to and including a dickhead floor manager (David Witts), a hot-shot, gakked up nepo baby (Josh Hutcherson), and the stuffy suit whose job it is to protect said nepo baby’s interests (Jeremy Fucking Irons). Along for the ride is Eloise’s daughter, Agent Verona Parker (Emmy Raver-Lampmann) the most badass and hungover FBI agent on the planet.

Subtlety is not the name of the game here, and the script, by the legendary Kurt Wimmer, avoids getting into granular details. Multiple times a character will be seeking top secret information, so they’ll just call their inside guy or gal and the intel is obtained just like that. No explanation needed. The person in the nicer suit has the deets. Don’t ask how. The dialogue makes the same trade-off of details for flow. Some exchanges are humorously inane in terms of content, but in terms of rhythm and posturing, its aces all the way. In one scene, Agent Parker is reading a pamphlet about bees and says the following line to her partner:

“Bees are interesting little fuckers. Did you know that?”

Know what? That they’re interesting?

She follows this up with absolutely no facts about bees. But it doesn’t matter because the pace of the exchange is key, not the content.

Same goes for the action. Fans of the genre have been spoiled by the stunt-forward likes of John Wick, and while it would be nice for every action movie to have such attention to detail, Wick is the exception to the rule to be sure. The Beekeeper doesn’t skimp on the action, but it’s less about showcasing physicality and more about creating the brutal energy of fistfights and gun battles. As such, the film uses editing and short takes to construct the hard-hitting brawls, but not in that Paul Greengrass/mid-stage MCU way where you can’t see a damned thing. Some moments are better than others, but for the most part there’s enough clarity to give the action sequences the punch they require.

While the beekeeper himself doesn’t utilize his bees like we’d all expect (a flaw for which I previously dinged the much inferior The Bricklayer), he does mix gasoline with honey to make napalm, which rocks. He also has an ethos that feels more connected to the art of beekeeping than the titular bricklayer’s ethos did to the art of laying bricks. As a bonus, there are a handful of dialogue beats that make punny reference to apiculture.

I won’t get fully into the details of where the beekeeper’s skills were forged, but it’s one of those things that becomes funnier the more you think about it. But that’s fine. Again, the film knows this and doesn’t care.

Statham is a hell of a presence, as has come to be(e) expected, and here he’s surrounded by a hive of character actors going as big as humanly possible. They get to handle all of the dialogue, while he gets to scowl, sneer, and then kill bad guys in such creative and cruel ways that it’s almost as if he gets off on killing. This is good. This is the catharsis that the action flicks of the ‘80s and ‘90s were so good at providing. Nowadays we prefer action heroes who have to reckon with their propensity toward violence (again, John Wick), but it’s admittedly nice to just call the beekeeper a good guy even though he’s basically Jason Voorhees.

Loud, fast, and primally satisfying, The Beekeeper is far from the smartest movie ever made, but if you wanna see good guys doing horrific things to bad guys, look no further. In my review of The Bricklayer, I lament that the film wishes it could be PlaneThe Beekeeper is definitely the Plane of 2024.

No need to wait until the end of the credits. There’s no…stinger.

Directed by David Ayer

Written by Kurt Wimmer

Starring Jason Statham, Emmy Raver-Lampman, Bobby Naderi, Josh Hutcherson, Jeremy Fucking Irons

Rated R, 105 minutes