Here’s the beautiful thing about David Ayer’s “The Beekeeper,” which is essentially a “John Wick” ripoff starring Jason Statham as a former top-secret government assassin who violently unretires after someone kills his bees: If for some twisted reason you showed me this movie right after I’d woken up from a 10-year coma and told me it was opening in theaters that Friday, I might not have any idea what year I was in, but I would know — within five minutes, and beyond a shadow of a doubt — that it was the second weekend of January.
Too silly for late August, too memorable for streaming (Statham only has about 12 lines in this film, and one of them is “I’d like to thank you for putting up with me and my bees”), and so committed to its own stupidity that it starts to feel like smart counter-programming for prestige fare like “Poor Things” and “American Fiction,” “The Beekeeper” could reorient a lost critic to their current place in the film calendar as reliably as the North Star might point a wayward sailor back to port. For me, there’s a strange comfort in that. For you, well, there’s a phenomenal scene in which Statham kills the world’s most annoying henchman by tethering him to a pickup truck and then launching the truck off a bridge at full speed.
By February, that might not be enough to move the needle, and the audacity of the big plot reveal that it tees up — a truly delightful bit of world-building that I wouldn’t dare spoil here — might come off as more low-rent than high-risk. On the first anniversary of Gerard Butler’s “Plane,” however, it almost feels like flying.
To be clear, “The Beekeeper” is no “Plane.” It’s not even a “Kandahar.” Those movies had a certain degree of narrative integrity. This movie doesn’t. It doesn’t have it, doesn’t want it, doesn’t need it. What this movie has — courtesy of Kurt Wimmer’s upwardly mobile script — is a rickety ladder that it climbs from comically low stakes up to the highest levels of power.
The first step: An inciting incident that unfolds with all the dramatic credibility of a Life Alert commercial, as a widowed Massachusetts school teacher played by Phylicia Rashad falls prey to a phishing scam so obvious that even a lonely old woman should know better. Her name is Eloise, and she clicks on a virus alert that connects her to the Jordan Belfort of malware (David Witts as Boyd), with whom she immediately shares all of her financial data. After Boyd and his call center goons zero out all of Eloise’s accounts (including the two million dollars she controls for a children’s charity), Eloise naturally follows through on the various fraud alerts that flood her phone and then calls her lawyer for next steps. Just kidding, this sweet old lady IMMEDIATELY PULLS OUT A HANDGUN AND SHOOTS HERSELF IN THE HEAD.
Anyway, none of this sits well with Adam Clay (Statham), the soft-spoken beekeeper who leases Eloise’s shed and talks exclusively in bee-related metaphors. When someone kicks his nest, Adam stings back without any regard for his own life. You see, Adam isn’t just a beekeeper, he used to be the Beekeeper, a top-secret extralegal government agent whose job is to save the colony from anything it deems a threat — and I do mean anything.
Adam’s just a civilian now, but it’s hard to completely divest oneself of a moral code that used to keep an entire country in check, and so he can’t help but trace the phishing attack back to its source. It takes him about three seconds to find the people responsible, and then another three seconds to burn their entire operation to the ground (the bad guys escalate from rent-a-cops to SWAT teams over the course of the movie but I don’t think Statham takes so much as a punch until the last fight). It could’ve ended there, but Boyd’s shit-eating child boss Derek Danforth (Josh Hutcherson channeling Jake Paul) orders him to go after Adam, and then Boyd orders his goons to blast Adam’s beehives with a shotgun, and then, yeah… Adam’s thinking he’s back.
From there, the rest of the movie effectively follows Adam as he kills his way up the food chain in pursuit of Derek, but “The Beekeeper” does its best to overcomplicate things in the hopes of churning its nonsense into a coherent mythology. Jeremy Irons’ character adds nothing to the movie but an exasperated hint of credibility, while Minnie Driver shows up for a two-scene role that strains to connect the dots between local issues and national politic.
The real problem here starts with the thoroughly disposable part of Special Agent Verona Parker, an FBI desk jockey who just so happens to be the late Eloise’s daughter. Played by “Hamilton” actress Emmy Raver-Lampman (oddly tone-deaf in a sarcastic performance that makes Verona seem oblivious to the fact that her mother just shot herself in the head), Verona and her partner Wiley (Bobby Naderi as the family man in over his head) act as the audience’s entry point into this story as they stay on Adam’s heels and learn about his classified existence. The confusion baked into their Rosencrantz and Guildenstern-like adventures often serves to reinforce how little sense any of the world-building makes, none of it dumber or more derivative than Adam’s encounter with the current Beekeeper (Megan Le), a minigun-wielding lunatic who dresses like Jubilee and shoots like Rambo. Aren’t the Beekeepers supposed to be subtle and righteous?
Forget being a good person, Adam’s replacement isn’t even a decent shot. Like most of the action scenes here, the gas station fight between the Beekeepers is short and chaotic and it ends without Statham so much as flinching (the ever-grimacing Statham has a strict “one facial expression per career” rule and Ayer has no interest in violating the terms of his lead actor’s contract). Ayer’s decision to enlist Jeremy Marinas and his stunt team from 87eleven only adds to the off-brand “John Wick” of it all, though Ayer and Wimmer get some real mileage from the decision to lean into Adam’s invincibility at every turn. The question isn’t “will anyone stop him?” so much as it’s “when will he stop?,” and the unremarkable action choreography is often redeemed by the sheer ridiculousness of the situations in which it’s deployed.
It’s a shame that the morality of Adam’s mission is such a poor fit for the gruesomeness of his best kills (there is a greatbit of ultra-violence in an elevator towards the end), and “The Beekeeper 2: Blood and Honey” would be wise to let Statham go full Jigsaw and just destroy bad guys in the goriest way possible. This potential franchise-starter is already running on fumes by the time Ayer is finally given the latitude to cut loose, though I enjoyed the hail Mary-like casting of London-born, South Africa-raised dancing giant Taylor James as the whacked out mercenary who shows up in the third act and gives Adam a run for his money.
Be that as it may, 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 civilization 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. On the strength of its pure January-ness.
Grade: C
Amazon MGM Studios will release “The Beekeeper” in theaters on Friday, January 12.
