MOVIE REVIEW – If you were wondering whether there would be enough funny beekeeping metaphors in The Beekeeper to get your revenge with a brutal beating and massacre, you can now breathe a sigh of relief. Although director David Ayer has kept his usual somber style, which is as serious as appendicitis, you can still get a sense from Jason Statham’s acting – when he talks about ‘protecting the hive’ or ‘chasing out the wasps’ – how much fun this film could have been in the hands of a director who could have done more than just pile on the usual B-movie clichés. True, it’s a treat in itself to watch Statham, the bald action star, take down a small army of enemies – government agents and mercenaries alike – with his bare fists.

Let’s not sugarcoat it: Kurt Wimmer’s script couldn’t be more simple and stupid. Statham stars as Adam Clay, a retired agent from a secret national security organization who is deployed when “crime starts to run rampant” anywhere in the country. Although Adam no longer fills the role of “The Beekeeper”, as the agents of this secret government outfit are known, he now lives as a real, live-in beekeeper, carefully tending hives and making honey on Eloise Parker’s (Phylicia Rashad) picturesque farm. When Adam reveals that no one has ever cared for him as much as this former schoolteacher, we can already sense that tragedy is about to strike. It doesn’t take long to figure out exactly what.

Retired Eloise is about to fall victim to an IT version of the “grandchild scam”. A virus alert appears on her laptop and Eloise immediately calls United Data Group. Soon Garnett (David Witts), a slick member of the firm, is swindling the old lady out of her savings and a two million dollar charity account he is managing.

At the data-mining headquarters, Garnett – and later Enzo Cilenti as Rico Anzalone, an even more cunning conman for an even bigger sister organisation – poses and brags like some poor man’s Jordan Belfort from The Wolf of Wall Street. Since this is an Ayer film, the crooks’ offices are obligingly lit and look like spectacular nightclubs.

It could have been a different kind of film…

If we leave out the bee-keeping ex-con super agent, the story would be basically the same as the Bulgarian film The Lessons of Blaga, which was nominated for the 2024 Academy Awards in the international film category. But whereas in that realistic and real-life thriller the title character, also a retired teacher, crosses over to the dark side and joins the criminal element, Eloise is much less resourceful. She immediately gives up and kills herself instead of the criminals. Goodbye, Phylicia! It was a noble sacrifice that someone had to make for Jason Statham to launch his one-man vendetta.

FBI agent Eloise’s daughter Verona (Emmy Raver-Lampman) feels even more guilty for rarely visiting home and is shocked to learn the reason for her mother’s suicide. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has been searching in vain for two years for the phishing network, without any results. But for Adam, once a member of the secretive Beekeeper unit, it only takes one phone call to track down the hackers with the help of an old IT colleague. Determined and with a concrete plan up his sleeve, he sets out to destroy them with his bare fists and a few petrol bottles. Garnett and his gang also investigate Adam, but their premeditated revenge doesn’t turn out the way they had planned.

Of course, Adam’s murderous vendetta has the FBI brigade led by Verona and her partner Wiley (Bobby Naderi) hot on his heels, while the connections behind the fraud become clearer and clearer. The various phishing centers are all indebted to a spoiled young man called Derek Danforth (Josh Hutcherson), a cocaine addict with a wealthy family background who skateboards around his office in his eye-catching hideous clothes (like that puke green suit!) and wears his hideously idiotic hairdo on his head.

Good actors, lousy dialogue

Choosing Hutcherson for this role is certainly an interesting choice, but neither he nor Wimmer’s dialogue make the character a very convincing or exciting villain. Jeremy Irons, on the other hand, gives an enjoyable performance as Wallace Westwyld, a former CIA director who now acts as an overqualified babysitter after being hired by Derek’s mother, the influential Jessica Danforth (Jemma Redgrave), to watch over the troublemaking boy. Jessica’s role in the public eye becomes clear in later twists and turns.

When Derek realizes that Clay is on to him, he concludes that the safest place to be is with his mother and her extensive security team. Unfortunately, the scenario takes a reckless turn: Derek decides to turn up at his mother’s luxurious ‘beach house’ for a weekend of the most surprisingly unexpected, where he throws a party for his dubious friends.

Will Adam be able to take on a well-equipped government security team, FBI agents and Westwyld’s dubious assassins all at the same time?? What do you think?! We’re talking about Jason Statham!

In his recent directors, Ayer seems to be paying less and less attention to actors, more like puppets in his action scenes. (In the case of poor Minnie Driver, it’s even less; she’s basically just making a phone call as the head of the CIA.) In this respect, too, he wisely chose Statham, whose almost comic seriousness makes the film bearable, as he thoroughly beats or shoots everyone on both sides of the law at every turn, with minimal change in his frozen expression. Here and there he pauses for a moment to state his moral convictions about such evils as stealing from innocent old people, and generally reserves his murders for the real villains.

More humor would not have hurt

The sight of Statham’s Clay quickly transforming his assailants’ weapons, using everything from a fire extinguisher to a hoist cable to a large bottle of honey to defeat them, is far more entertaining than all the dialogue in the film at once. One of the most interesting confrontations is with a newer version of the Beekeeper, Anisette (Megan Le), who seems to have taken Prince’s dressing advice. Her shiny purple metallic jacket seems an oddly striking choice for an agent from a secret organization. Not to mention how flammable it is.

Ayer overdoes it all: with powerful action sequences, a loud sound design, steady editing and a thunderous score by David Sardy and Jared Michael Fry that underlines the film’s tense atmosphere.

The idea that someone would turn this horrible mess into a new Statham franchise seems unlikely. But if it does happen, let’s hope that the next one will be made by a director who knows humor, as Statham himself could be a partner in this – we’ve seen him do it in Guy Ritchie’s films, for example.

-Gergely Herpai (BadSector)-