Here at The Pitch, we’re fairly confident that we’re about to go “all in” when there’s a new Jason Statham film on the horizon. Our critic group chat was electrified the day the first trailer dropped for The Beekeeper, in a way that… well, let us just say other professional art critics probably do not. Statham career represents to us a very particular vertical: he always makes action films, he always plays the same character, but somehow every project he touches comes with a style and story that exist just far enough outside the playing field’s usual tropes and standards. The dude picks films with a decided je ne sais quoi that always goes above and beyond in an unexpected manner, and it really sets his career apart from his closest counterparts, like the last decade and a half of Liam Neeson’s work. They’re both wickedly dependable in their lanes, Statham just seems to be willing to roll more dice with where his films will venture.
So when that Beekeeper trailer promised us a man doing explosions and punches but also managing bees but also doin’ revenge on cryptobros, we were fully invested. What the film does with its somewhat scattered premise is shoot for the stars, between big ideas and unhinged pacing, and strike that very special Statham spot with a direct hit.
Adam Clay (Statham) is a beekeeper who lives and works on the land of an elderly woman out in the middle of nowhere. While he’s tending to the hive, she gets a call from a tech scam artist (David Witts) who cons her with the most obvious phishing scheme in history. She stumbles through installing malware and handing over her password, only to have all of her bank accounts reduced to zero—including a generic “nonprofit for kids” that she manages, with $2 million just sitting there. The scam artist does all of this from a lit-up stage in a call center, while cheered on by his army of trolls, all while performing a sort of Jordan Belfort meets Jean-Ralphio Saperstein game show host celebration of ruining this woman’s life. Her cell phone starts popping up with notifications from her various financial institutions that they’ve noticed questionable activity on her accounts. She naturally reports the scam and gets all of her money back.
No. No, she doesn’t. She shoots herself in the head.
Now, her cop daughter (Emmy Raver-Lampman) has teamed up with Adam Clay to track down the people who murdered her mom. Unbeknownst to her, Clay is part of a secret extra-government agency called The Beekeepers, and with a single call he is able to track down this evil scam call center. He shows up with two containers of gasoline, announces he is going to burn down the building, and proceeds to burn down the building.
Just to recap: everything from the trailer that seemed like it would be about Statham finding the people who killed his landlady occurs in the first act and is fully resolved. It’s been a while since I experienced such a massive leap in expected narrative, and I was looking around our theater to make sure everyone else was seeing the same film I was.
From here, it turns out this call center was one of dozens, run by Derek Danforth (Josh Hutcherson)—the kind of SF venture capitalist that skateboards through his office, has a sushi stand for only him, and has an obnoxiously long, specific coffee order. He is one of a dozen character in this film that seem crafted out of nothing but generic complaints about Millennials and a set of coastal stereotypes. At any given point, it feels like Statham might deliver a monologue directly to camera about the folly of avocado toast. It is hard to overstate how Boomer-centric every part of The Beekeeper’s perspective radiates.
Danforth has a head of security that used to run the CIA or some shit, played by Jeremy Irons who really earns his day-rate in this flick. Minnie Driver is also here for some inexplicable reason. A good chunk of the rest of the film revolves around Josh Hutcherson moving from neon lit party to high-end party, holding conversations that mirror, and I quote directly: “So which do you enjoy more? The money or the power?” Just portions of thought expressed as mustache twirling evil amid conversations about crypto or AI or gluten intolerence or whatever it is the script is mad at younger generations regarding.
Erstwhile, Statham must deal with waves of strange comic book assassins that seem to have teleported into his dimension from The Running Man. These action sequences set against exploding gas stations and car chases and machine guns wind up reducing a good chunk of the remaining runtime to a series of bee puns, grunted just before said explosions. Within these periods, we also discover more about The Beekeepers operation, which seems to want to do world-building a la The Kingsman for possible extended franchise potential. (It’s worth noting that, while there are hundreds of Beekeepers around the world, it seems that Statham is the only one that actually raises bees? Which is a shame, because the assassins murder all his bees with a shotgun, fully sending him into John Wick territory.)
In the third act, we find out the reason Josh Hutcherson runs an evil megacorp is because his mother recently stepped down as CEO… to become President of the United States of America. That’s right: there’s an evil lady-president and she’s got a coke snorting degenerate son that keeps getting her in trouble. If you were unsure of the film’s politics before now, well, there you go. There’s you Aldi-brand Hillary Clinton and her Hunter Biden son, somehow. Truly, a slack-jawed moment for the audience.
Director David Ayer (Suicide Squad) crafts some truly…. acceptable, functional action sequences here. Kurt Wimmer (Law Abiding Citizen) has a script that truly elevates the film above and beyond, its a rarefied stratosphere of action film that feels like a Frankenstein monster of other movie ideas, all stitched together into 105 minutes of bright lights and loud sounds. Wimmer’s Children of the Corn reboot is one of the few films to ever earn two different negative reviews at The Pitch, for having big ambitions with terrible execution, and a weird fixation of maybe taking Greta Thunberg down a peg or two?
And yet, Statham persists. It’s difficult to parse what it is this film wants to say, beyond being mad that youngsters these days have parasitic jobs at computers instead of working on farms with their hands like real men. That said, I’d still watch three sequels tomorrow. It’s a big studio film that has the angry, bizarre outlier perspective of an indie film, that’s hilarious for all the wrong reasons and entertaining for many of the right ones. It’s a very stupid joke that takes itself too seriously, inconsistently, and the sheer inability to guess what kind of film it wants to be, scene by scene, is a mysterious spectacle to behold.