Director: David Ayer
Cast: Jason Statham, Emmy Raver-Lampman, Josh Hutcherson, Jeremy Irons, Minnie Driver, Phylicia Rashad
Screenplay: Kurt Wimmer
Running Length: 1:45
MPAA Classification: R (Violence, Language)
U.S Release Date: 1-12-24 (wide)
Genre: Action/Thriller
There once was a time when I used to look forward to a Jason Statham film. While I wouldn't consider any of his previous films to be masterpieces by any means, they almost always delivered when it came to providing the thrills that one would normally expect from a movie with his name attached. His last few features, however, have started to become endurance tests and unfortunately, The Beekeeper continues the streak. It's not as painful as last year's Meg 2: The Trench (which was awful) or the Expend4bles (which somehow managed to be even worse), but that would be damning this movie with faint praise. Between the subpar acting, asinine dialogue, and a story that at times feels like a bad John Wick knockoff, there's almost nothing here to recommend.
Jason Statham this time around plays Clay, a retired Beekeeper who has chosen to live a life of beekeeping. See, in this film, a beekeeper isn't just someone who cares for bees and makes honey, they're also part of a clandestine organization that operates outside of the government and whose sole responsibility is restoring balance to the hive when needed (if you didn't get that the first time don't worry, we're told this about another fifteen times throughout the film). When his sweet neighbor and friend Eloise (Phylicia Rashad) falls victim to a phishing scam and has all her money wiped from her accounts, she commits suicide. Saddened and angered by the loss of his only friend, he seeks revenge by going to the place responsible (a call center that purposely scams the elderly) and burns it to the ground. Of course, this being a revenge flick, things don't end there. The call center is actually part of a bigger criminal organization that's headed by a young man named Derek (Josh Hutcherson), who, as it turns out, is protected by some powerful people. Those people are ex-CIA director Wallace Westwyld (Jeremy Irons) and the current CIA director (Minnie Driver). None of this matters, of course, to Clay, and once he learns what's really going on behind the scenes, nothing will stop him from carrying out his duties as a beekeeper.
If all of that sounds ridiculous, that's because it is. Had the film embraced its silliness, this could have been an enjoyable revenge tale, but for some reason the filmmakers have decided to adopt a serious tone which pretty much sucks the fun out of it all. It doesn't help that Jason Statham barely has any good one-liners and almost never cracks a smile. Statham's Clay is so bland and lacks any dimension that it's hard to care or root for him. I felt more sorry for the bees than I did his character (or any character for that matter). Meanwhile, Jeremy Irons' character is essentially there to act as an exposition dump. At one point, him and Josh Hutcherson's character has a scene that's basically a rip-off of the Baba Yaga scene from John Wick that instead of trying to come off as suspenseful, it felt like I was watching a bad parody (in fact, that's how I would describe the movie as a whole). Everyone else seems to be acting like they're there to collect a paycheck, and given what they have to work with, I honestly can't say I blame them.
It would have been easy to overlook a lot of the film's problems had the action scenes been half-way decent. With the exception of one sequence that occurs during the climax, none of what The Beekeeper offers is new or exciting in terms of choreography or style. At least they're filmed with some clarity, so that's something I guess. It's sad to see how far David Ayer has fallen. His last good film was arguably 2014's Fury, and it's hard to believe that this was made by the same man. The Beekeeper isn't the worst film he's made in the last ten years, but like Statham, the streak of bad films continues. 15 or even 10 years ago, I probably would have been excited about the idea of an Ayer/Statham collaboration, but now it's something to be wary of and, quite frankly, avoided altogether.
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