The Doctor’s Diagnosis: C
With Jason Statham dominating my list of the worst movies of 2023, I wasn’t exactly looking forward to The Beekeeper. Add in that this movie is directed by David Ayer, who previously brought us utter crap like Suicide Squad and End of Watch, and I felt a certain sense of dread when entering the theater this week. However, I can happily report that The Beekeeper isn’t awful. It isn’t particularly good and I will probably forget about it by the end of the year, but it is the kind of dumb action movie that can provide perfectly serviceable entertainment for a couple of hours. I guess I can’t really fault it too much in that regard.
Statham plays Adam Clay, a beekeeper that rents a garage on the property of a retired woman named Eloise (played by Phylicia Rashad, who I know best as the mother on The Cosby Show). Eloise is tricked by a phishing scam and robbed of her life savings, causing her to commit suicide. Of course, Jason Statham doesn’t take too kindly to such things, so he tracks down the organization that conned her, beats the shit out of a bunch of people and burns the place to the ground. At this point in the movie, I was genuinely enjoying the hell out of this movie. The phishing scam is a relatable hook, the villains are the kind of human garbage that one longs to see get punched in the face and Statham is doing what he does best. He’s certainly not the most versatile actor in the world, but he’s good at this kind of role and the film is playing to his strengths.
However, then the movie keeps going and becomes so increasingly ridiculous that I wonder if it was intended as satire. Statham’s character isn’t actually a beekeeper in the normal sense, but rather a secret badass that has been trained by the government to be the ultimate killing machine. This checks off the “secret badass” motif that seems to be required of all action movies in a post-John Wick world. The symbolism of the “beekeeper” label is made repeatedly clear (if you don’t get it the first twenty times, the movie will explain it ten more times), but such people are humorously devoted to living up to the label. I’m not sure if you guys need to be literally keeping bees in your spare time in order to keep up the metaphor, but whatever. The purpose of such people is really never made clear from the government’s perspective as it is repeatedly stated that they exist outside of the chain of command. This whole enterprise seems like a really bad idea, honestly.
The online scammers are perfectly good villains, but the movie doesn’t stop there. No, the scam ultimately leads, quite literally, to the frigging White House and the President is a significant character. The rampant escalation of the situation makes the film feel satirical, with the second half of the movie feeling so far removed from how the story starts that it feels like you are suddenly watching The Beekeeper Part 5 and wondering how the hell we ever got here from a story about con artists ripping off elderly people. It would be like if the original Friday the 13th and Jason X were two halves of the same movie.
The supporting cast is oddly strong, with a couple of big names showing up randomly in minor roles. In addition to Phylicia Rashad, Jeremy Irons pops up as the former director of the CIA in order to provide exposition and Minnie Driver briefly shows up as the current CIA director for two scenes and I can’t remember the last time I saw her in something. Josh Hutcherson is having a frigging ball as the main villain that can’t seem to decide if he is a member of Gen Z or Gen X, as one minute he’s taking about oat milk and sushi and then the next minute he’s riding a skateboard and doing a line of blow. I’m not sure what he was going for here, but its pretty damn entertaining whatever it is. Unfortunately, we also have a subplot about an FBI agent, played by Emmy Raver-Lampman, that grinds the film to a halt whenever it appears. Her performance is actually quite good, even if she seems to be playing the same character as she did in Blacklight, but this storyline serves little purpose other than adding an additional, unnecessary 20 minutes to the movie.
Fortunately, The Beekeeper is a monumental improvement on Statham’s godawful output from 2023, but it is also not nearly as good as Wrath of Man or as fun as The Expendables 2. It’s a decent middle-of-the-road Statham movie, along the lines of something like Homefront. If you are just looking for a way to kill a couple of hours, then The Beekeeper is a perfectly serviceable option for you.
Image by: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beekeeper_(2024_film)#/media/File:The_Beekeeper_poster.jpg
