If you’re not in the market for what David Ayer is forcefully selling in batty January thriller The Beekeeper at the point when someone says to the titular character, “To bee or not to bee, that is the bloody question,” then you might as well just give up and walk out. By this stage, late in the film, Ayer and screenwriter Kurt Wimmer have given us just about enough bee puns, bone cracks and bizarre cameos from British actors to give those in the right headspace (read: drunk) a solid, low-stakes, medium-reward new year’s effort. 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.
It’s primed as Jason Statham’s John Wick (not that the actor needs another franchise since out of his last 10 movies, only two were not part of a series) and its desperation to be so can often be distracting, but in a crowded landscape of equally desperate imitators, it makes a more persuasive case than most. Statham knows exactly what to do here, more than most would, and has figured out just how seriously, or not, to take such material. During the cold open, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this was going to be more serious than most. He plays a withdrawn beekeeper working on land owned by a retired teacher, played by the luminous and wasted Phylicia Rashad. In a surprisingly wrenching set-up, she gets hoodwinked by a crooked call centre into allowing access to her accounts, leading to automatic bankruptcy and a self-inflicted bullet through the head. Statham is spurred into tackling the system that preyed on her and so a mission begins.
It’s an effectively involving motivator, although Ayer rushes through it so fast that one can sense his boredom shooting a scene without shooting (a shame as more of Rashad and her relationship with Statham wouldn’t have gone amiss). It introduces her FBI agent daughter (a wildly unconvincing Emmy Raver-Lampman) and allows for the start of some hilariously rubbish dialogue delivered with a very grave face (“Taking from an elderly person is as bad as stealing from a child … maybe worse!”) as well as many, often confusing, lines involving bees (“When someone hurts an older person, sometimes they’re left to face the hornets alone!”). In screenwriter Kurt Wimmer’s world, a beekeeper isn’t just a beekeeper but is also a trained assassin, part of a hive protecting the queen bee, which means that the FBI agents on his trail are forced to, you know, read books on beekeeping to get to the bottom of this.
Like most of these films, it’s then structured like a video game all the way to the Big Bad Boss. Given that it was set in the US but filmed in the UK, these road stops involve an underused Minnie Driver, a snarling Jeremy Irons and a dead-behind-the-eyes Jemma Redgrave, none of them having anywhere near as much fun as Josh Hutcherson’s obnoxious nepo baby tech bro. Bizarrely and ambitiously, the Beekeeper finds that the honey leads all the way to the White House and Wimmer aims to vaguely make some sort of commentary about the fine line between the evils of politics and the evils of big business. But then not really, he’s not taking any of this all that seriously, proven in a finale that’s all action and little talk (an ebulliently gory hallway fight scene is a real blast) and an end-note that clumsily leaves things open for more.
Statham is ever the pro (one wonders if he’s had enough training at this stage to make a dangerously good assassin for real), but it’s all more of the same. His two non-franchise films of late showed how great he can be when afforded both a little more lightness (Operation Fortune) and a lot more darkness (Wrath of Man), and it would be satisfying to see him try something just a little out of the ordinary next. He works well with Ayer, who himself works better on a smaller, gnarlier scale, allowed more freedom to get nasty (his Suicide Squad remains a great-looking, what-if disaster). There’s a grubby, late-night appeal to his dialled-up trash aesthetic and The Beekeeper mostly works because of it. Bee prepared for a sequel.