The Beekeeper review: Predictable Jason Statham actioner lacks buzz
Even an ass-kicking Statham can't 'protect the hive' from general boredom in David Ayer's latest
In The Beekeeper, Jason Statham plays, as you may well have surmised, a beekeeper. When we first meet him, this beekeeper is the stoic kind, unconcerned with the world beyond his hive. Even the woman who’s renting him a barn where he harvests his bees’ honey is kept at arm’s length. Soon, though, we learn this beekeeper used to also be, well, another kind of “beekeeper.” And if me saying the film’s title oh so many times in this intro has already irked you enough, worry: for David Ayer’s efficiently directed actioner utters it so many times and exhausts its bluntly delivered metaphor so often that just watching Statham punch and shoot his way out of any scene he’s in becomes an exercise in exhaustion.
Clay (Statham) lives for his bees. He’s methodical in how he cares for them. He wants nothing more than to keep them safe. It’d be a prerogative if it didn’t also feel like a self-imposed mission, a way, perhaps, to turn what used to be his job into a newfound way of life out here in the middle of nowhere. And it’s that previous life that catches up to him when Eloise Parker (Phylicia Rashad), his landlady, winds up dead in her home—a suicide provoked by the sudden loss of all of her money courtesy of a well-orchestrated phishing scam Clay then vows to take down.
He’s well equipped to do so. In his past life, he was a “Beekeeper,” part of a clandestine organization whose sole directive was to keep “the hive” (namely the USA) safe from threats that government branches like the FBI and the CIA couldn’t well handle themselves. Retired now, but driven to avenge his endearing neighbor’s death, Clay taps into his Beekeeper background and begins to wage a knock ’em and sock ’em war against the people scamming the elderly, one call center at a time, slowly moving ever closer to the higher echelons of power where the money then directs him. Also on the hunt for those who helped scam Ms. Parker is her daughter, Agent Verona Parker (Emmy Raver-Lampman), who begins leveraging her FBI skills to try and stop Clay from further causing major destruction (he first burns down an entire call center building) and to figure out who is behind this multi-million dollar operation (hint: this goes all the way up). One wonders why the script never dwells on Agent Parker’s grief, let alone weaves it into a much more textured characterization; she’s reduced to being torn between wanting Clay to get revenge and being saddled with a moral high ground given her employer.