‘The Beekeeper’ review: Sting and a miss

Jason Statham and David Ayer miss the forest for the bees in The Beekeeper, a routine revenge ride that forgets the fun of its own premise.

Tone is crucial to the success of any movie, even bad ones you love to hate. All of a given film’s technical and dramatic elements have to be in near-perfect harmony with each other in order to bring about the right tone for an audience to gel with like honey. Sometimes, those elements are off-balance, which leads to a tonal clash, a collapse of the hive mind. For example: you can have a movie where all of the actors are either stone-cold badasses or sneering villains, standing tall in front of dark settings and beating each other to a bloody pulp…and all that serious tone doesn’t land for a second all because of those damn beads.

Sorry, bees.

Anyway, The Beekeeper is not just the day job of Adam Clay (Jason Statham), it’s also a secret organization of covert assassins meant to keep the balance of the world when governments fail. But Clay is retired and taking the more literal version of his job title, tending to the stingers swarming the barn of an old Massachusetts teacher (Phylicia Rashad). One day the kindly old lady gets a confusing pop-up ad that turns out to be a phishing scam, draining her of all her funds and will to live. Clay uses his beekeeping skills (the covert kind, not the agricultural kind) to track down the scammers’ headquarters, bust some heads, and blow it to kingdom come for revenge.

This gets the attention of the scammers’s douchey boss (Josh Hutcherson), his connected handyman (Jeremy Irons), and the teacher’s daughter (Emmy Raver-Lampman) who also happens to be an FBI agent trying to find out how far the beehive spreads. All of this as Clay goes on a warpath up the chain of phishing command to prevent anyone from ever being robbed by flashing windows on their laptops ever again.

To bee or not to bee.

Tone may be one of many details to consider when determining a movie’s quality, but it’s a detail that can make or break a motion picture. Unfortunately, The Beekeeper spends almost all of its running time trying to take itself more seriously than a movie called The Beekeeper has any business being. No matter how much macho brooding, fist fights, f-bombs, or blood is splashed on the screen, the movie is still about a beekeeper who used to be a secret agent with the codename of…”The Beekeeper.” Any time it’s mentioned in the movie, whether used for a punchline or just stated as a matter of fact, it gets a chuckle. And a movie this brooding and brutal has little room for fun (at least on purpose).

The script from Kurt Wimmer (Equilibrium, Law Abiding Citizen, Expend4bles) doesn’t embrace the ridiculousness of its premise, which would allow the audience laugh along with the movie. Instead it demands you to accept its goofy title without a second thought. Wimmer clearly wasn’t clever enough to realize the opportunity The Beekeeper gave him to poke fun at the routine premise of “old secret badass comes out of retirement to avenge an innocent,” either through witty dialogue mocking the semi-nostalgic tropes of these kinds of action movies or through beekeeper-related stunts. Sure, that sounds brainless, but again, the title of the movie is The Beekeeper.

Not even a B-movie.

The real tragedy here is that director David Ayer (Fury, End of Watch) is more than capable of making worthwhile schlock. He’s no stranger to macho posturing (see Sabotage) or hilarious premises (see Bright), but he’s had trouble in the past mixing those things together into an entertaining cocktail. Seeing his Suicide Squad (2016) and James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad (2021) back-to-back is proof positive of his basic shortcomings. That’s not to say Ayer is inherently untalented, especially when it comes to filming exciting, even invigorating action with gripping characters. By contrast to his more high-concept work, The Beekeeper is stripped-down, making it easier to appreciate how well he and the fight choreography team put together the beat downs here.

Statham mostly uses his fists and tools (à la The Equalizer) to take down baddies and the fights don’t have annoyingly choppy editing or disorienting shakey-cam. By the time we hit the finale and Statham finally starts pulling triggers, Ayer captures the controlled chaos quite well. But again, the skill Ayer displays here makes you wish the script and mood of his movie was just a touch lighter for more creative kills. The bad guys literally shoot up bee boxes with shotguns, how do you not have the bees swarm the bad guys while buzzing past shotgun shells? Live a little!

Leaving a bad buzz.

That morose energy also afflicts the cast. Statham is a bonafide action star, no question, but he’s at his best when allowed to flex his understated charisma here and there. Even in his later years with a resume featuring old timers and giant sharks, he’s still got that Guy Ritchie lad-charm making him more than the average buff baldie shoved in front of a camera for fight scenes. And yet Statham plays the blandest possible version of himself in The Beekeeper, never moving his face above a stern grimace even when he gets a one-liner. He doesn’t get to woo anyone or go face-to-face with an imposing goon, just pistols to un-cock and fingers to cut off. The movie has to bring in a gang of colorful New Zealander mercenaries wearing outfits from a ’90s rave at the last minute just to balance-out Statham’s blank presence.

The only one trying to bring any fun to The Beekeeper is Raver-Lampman as the cop chasing Statham’s tail. She seems to be the only one acknowledging how ridiculous everything is, but even that is delivered with a half-hearted shrug. Hutcherson has the frosted tips and lone diamond earring of a crypto-mining scammer, granted, but he just seems bored in every scene he’s in until he snorts a few lines of blow in the climax (maybe he’s a method actor?) Not even Irons, one of the great sneering Brits to play a bad guy, could give a bee’s knee about the events of The Beekeeper. Minnie Driver even shows up for two scenes and it’s barely a footnote between Statham’s punches.

The bottom hive.

The best thing about The Beekeeper is that it’s a functional action movie. Ayer knows to make fight scenes look like they hurt without hurting the audience, and Statham can still walk under his own power as an imposing badass on screen, script be damned. The worst thing about The Beekeeper is that it’s just another functional action movie. It tries so hard to keep a straight face when it should be laughing at itself so the audience can too. There’s no reason for everyone behind and in front of the camera to take a movie about a bone-crunching beekeeper so seriously, especially when all the movie boils down to is just The Equalizer but with bees. No need to be a buzzkill about it.

The Beekeeper hits theaters Friday, January 12. Watch the trailer here.

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Images Courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios. Read more articles by Jon Winkler here.