As much as The Meg seemed super fun, The Beekeeper is what I hope Jason Statham continues to choose for movie vehicles. The premise is so beautifully dumb, all you need to do is sit back, relax, and watch the action star lay waste to a bunch of smug entitled brats. I just wish David Ayer leaned harder into the lunacy, which would have made this movie a dumpuary legend instead of standard fare dumpuary.
Statham plays Adam Clay, a man renting a barn in remote Massachusetts, owned by the sweet Eloise (Phylicia Rashad). Sweet, but naive, as scamming expert Mickey Garnett (David Witts) tricks poor elderly Eloise into giving all her passwords and Mickey swindles her millions in savings, making her commit suicide in shame. Angered, Adam finds the telemarketing office to enact his revenge, which leads to Boston’s Danforth Industries run by Wallace Westwyld (Jeremy Irons) and dipsh*t f*ckboy Derek Danforth (Josh Hutcherson). Also angry is Eloise’s daughter Verona (Emmy Raver-Lampman), an FBI agent, who follows the money not just to Derek, but to what “The Beekeeper” actually means to powerful society.
I think Jason Statham and David Ayer and the studio want The Beekeeper to be The Equalizer or John Wick but funnier. The first 30 minutes or so are promising for that: we get the pretty correctly shown panic and horror of slowly realizing someone is scamming you, and the cartoonishly evil people who prey on the lonely and unknowing. We also get to see Statham in a beater truck and beekeeping outfit beat the crap out of a bunch of haughty human garbage shocked their actions actually have consequences. The movie also layers in silly banter between Verona and her partner Matt (Bobby Naderi) and Derek and Wallace, incredulous that a beekeeper can be this well connected, intent on making puns and leaning into the movie’s absurdity. Irons and Hutcherson are really having a ball, with Hutch playing a giant sh*t heel and Jeremy Irons playing his wise, frustrated caretaker. The film has a bunch of chuckles really living out everyone’s fantasies to get revenge on scammers and make so many bee puns they eventually become pretty funny, building to a ludicrous ballsy plot twist in the middle.
That doesn’t pay off. That’s when the Beekeeper falls apart. That twist should have been at the end, setting up some sort of franchise. Instead, the movie transforms into something much more serious, coupled with more and more improbable Jason Statham “bee keeping” maneuvers that evade all surveillance and general logic of normal people. We’re also burning through plot, rushing as fast as we can to the even more rushed ending, where the movie just kind of stops, without Statham even saying something like “Protect the hive” or “Bee a better person” or “Time to get some sweet sweet honey.” The action also isn’t very good, save one ok scene in a claustrophobic hallway with an insane South African character they introduced 10 minutes prior. Sure.
Here’s my pun: The Beekeeper really doesn’t live up to the buzz. It feels incomplete, and I hope one of the streamers picks it up, and just starts over. Because there’s nothing funnier than when every bad guy looks right at another bad guy and goes “A beekeeper? A BEEKEEPER did this?” Sorry here’s another, bee better boys.