The story: Clay (Jason Statham) is a man of few words who lives to care for the beehives on his land. After his friend and neighbour (Phylicia Rashad) is found dead, he vows to track down and destroy the organisation responsible for her death.
This movie could not be simpler. Man with special skills gets angry. Enemy underestimates man. Man shreds the enemy into confetti. Roll credits. It is a format that has made billions at the box office.
There are a couple of factors that elevate the material in The Beekeeper above the usual revenge flick.
Statham’s limited range as an actor is put to good use. He is once more the cheesed-off bullet-headed man of whom little is known except that his consonants and vowels betray him as not just British, but full baked-beans-on-toast Bri’ish, born and raised within earshot of the chimes of Big Ben.
The other rule that operates in a Statham action movie is that, at some point, the story has to explain how a remnant from the other side of the Atlantic has washed up in, say, an alligator-infested Florida swamp. Or, in this case, a leafy country home in America, a sanctuary where the former warrior can put away the gun and pick up the honeycomb, to be left alone to contemplate the zen of the apiary.
Screenwriter Kurt Wimmer, like Statham, is a specialist. He has a penned a string of hard-guy movies, among them Law Abiding Citizen (2009) and Expend4bles (2023).
He is aware that the lone-wolf vigilante is always the same character (with minor variations) and knows that revenge movies get all their flavour from the villains.
Here, the baddies are telephone scammers preying on the computer-illiterate elderly. A glance at their modus operandi alone is enough to set one’s blood boiling – look at the comments section of a news story about seniors cheated of their life savings. The white-hot rage could power a town for months.
Director David Ayer makes scam-call centre boss Mickey (David Witts) a condescending motormouth. Josh Hutcherson’s spoilt mummy’s boy Derek is a beanbag-chair tech bro who swindles to afford wellness therapies.
But the final boss is old-money corporate executive Wallace Westwyld (played by another English icon, Jeremy Irons), his urbane charm set to maximum.
Ayer can let his stories get away from him – see his muddled superhero fantasy Suicide Squad (2016) and the hyperbolic finale of his otherwise solid tank war movie Fury (2014).
But here, he has assembled a superhero team of people in need of a Statham spine adjustment.
Hot take: The Beekeeper’s ludicrous league-of-assassins lore is best ignored, so look instead to the deliciously hateable villains.