You do not hire Jason Statham to read love poems onscreen, or to weep gently at the sight of nuzzling puppies, or to gaze thoughtfully at a particularly breathtaking sunset. You hire the Derbyshire native to kick ass and take names, with the “names” part being optional.
The cinematic missing link between Bruce Willis and Charles Bronson, Statham has been keeping a certain type of genre film alive for close to two decades. He’s not the last action hero standing — his Hobbs & Shaw partner Dwayne Johnson continues to flirt with big, loud, blowed-up-real-good moviemaking, international stars like Tony Jaa and Iko Uwais are hanging around, and everyone from Charlize Theron to Bob Odenkirk has trained hard enough to convince you they could kill entire armies with a corkscrew.
But Statham is one of the few above-the-title names that’s instantly synonymous with a kind of pulpy, trashy, cinema du bloody knuckles. You know exactly what you’re going to get: a no-frills cornucopia of he-man behavior, delivered with a primo Cockney accent to boot.
The creatives behind The Beekeeper are well aware of this star’s particular set of skills, and they’re all too happy to take maximum advantage of them. His character, Adam Clay, is indeed a keeper of bees, content to gingerly tend to his buzzing flock of workers day after day.
How he ended up practicing his trade on the farmland owned by an elderly schoolteacher (Phylicia Rashad) is, of course, not important. All that we need to know is that she’s the only one who ever looked after him, for some undisclosed reason or another.
And that his patron saint falls for the ol’ “Your Computer Has Been Infected” pop-up-window trick, which results in a cyberscammer call center conning her out of both her personal savings and several million dollars she’s stashed away for her charity.