The Beekeeper starring Jason Statham has earned itself a respectable Rotten Tomatoes score.
Currently sitting at 71%, this self-aware revenge thriller comes from End of Watch director David Ayer and unleashes The Meg’s Statham as ex-special operative Adam Clay, whose quiet life as a beekeeper is upended when his friend experiences a phishing scam and dies by suicide.
“Cheerfully undemanding and enjoyably retrograde, The Beekeeper proves that when it comes to dispensing action-thriller justice, Statham hasn’t lost his sting,” reads the review aggregator’s critics consensus.
Below, you’ll find snippets from several media outlets that were equally mesmerised and perplexed by Ayer and Statham’s new movie.
Digital Spy
“Statham doing his own stunts adds an effectively crunchy feel to the fight sequences. He’s also done enough of these movies to perfectly pitch lines like: ‘You have laws for these things until they fail – then you have me’.
“Sure, you could criticise several aspects of The Beekeeper, but there’s no way you’re watching this movie expecting something different to what you’re given. It might not be a great movie exactly, but you’ll be buzzing to see Jason Statham back doing what he does best.”
The Guardian
“I can’t imagine a devoted Beekeeper hive emerging any time soon (it’s far too derivative and far too rough around the edges), but there’s enough energy and well-pitched silliness to have audiences, ahem, swarming to cinemas this weekend.”
Empire Magazine
“David Ayer’s The Beekeeper, the latest action vehicle for Jason ‘The Stath’ Statham, doesn’t exactly give everyone’s favourite pollinating insects a glittering moment on the silver screen. But if nothing else, it certainly mentions them a lot.
“It’s all wildly over-edited and wildly over-lit, too, like the worst of Michael Bay’s vices, and it’s very hard to care about any of the fights, given we know so little about any of the characters: just The Stath, grimly dispatching faceless, endless bad guys with impunity, as is his wont. If that’s all you’re after, you should be satisfied.”
The Telegraph
“For all the stodginess, the action is dynamic – often shockingly gory – and enthusiastically marshalled by David Ayer. As director of the critically reviled Suicide Squad and Bright, he could obviously do with a hit. Or at least with a movie that isn’t a career-hobbling disaster.
“The Beekeeper is nobody’s idea of clever. But it contains a scene in which an evil mercenary puts a gun to Statham’s head and says: ‘To bee or not to bee?’ – and how can you hate a film that leans so cheerfully into its own ludicrousness?”
The Hollywood Reporter
“Ayer pumps everything up with a muscular shooting style, big-ass sound design, antsy cutting and a juddering score by David Sardy and Jared Michael Fry that leans into the brooding intensity. The notion that anyone might make a beeline to turn this punch-drunk nonsense into a new Statham franchise seems unlikely. But if that were to happen, let’s hope the next installment lands a director more willing to tap into the inherent humour in its star’s almost superhuman bad-assery.”
IndieWire
“There is plenty of sequel potential for a movie about an unstoppable killing machine who’s willing to threaten the world order in order to keep Western civilisation from going further off the rails. The Beekeeper brings a vaguely radical energy to that idea — an energy that, if nurtured, could make this into a politically chaotic series that distances itself from its better-crafted peers on the strength of its go-for-broke irreverence.”
The Beekeeper is out now in cinemas.