The first thing you need to know about THE BEEKEEPER is that, yes, Jason Statham is playing an honest-to-god, badass beekeeper. His name is Adam Clay, and we don’t learn much about him other than his obsession with his insect hive and his quaint, unexpected relationship with Eloise (Phylicia Rashad), a retired teacher who allows him to rent her garage for his beekeeping exploits. During the film’s opening scene, it becomes abundantly clear that this is Clay’s entire world, this clockwork operation of maintaining an ecosystem for bees, and his ruthless, pragmatic disposal of a rogue hive infesting Eloise’s land suggests a strange sort of kinship with a species that values order and hierarchy to maintain the hive.
It also suggests that you really don’t want to fuck with this guy, which is bad news for the internet scammers who convince Eloise that her computer is infected with malware and the only solution is to allow them remote access. By the end of the phone call, they’ve swiped everything: Eloise’s retirement benefits, her bank account, even the $2 million charitable endowment she manages, an unfathomable loss that drives her to suicide. Clay—who claims Eloise is the only person who ever took care of him—responds with righteous fury. It’s grief, but it’s grief by way of Statham’s familiar persona, his eyes betraying a glimmer of melancholy that accents his furrowed brow. You know he’s not going to spend a lot of time mourning Eloise, and he immediately sets out to exact revenge by taking down an operation that unexpectedly reaches to the upper echelon of the American government.
The second thing you need to know about THE BEEKEEPER is that it’s hysterically committed to the beekeeping bit. Once Clay’s presence and occupation becomes known to the operation’s dipshit CEO (Josh Hutcherson) and his former-CIA handler (Jeremy Irons), the pants-shitting commences. Everyone speaks about this beekeeper with the same reverent, hushed tones that the goons in JOHN WICK adopt when they’re freaking out about the Baba Yaga that’s come to claim their souls. For nearly half the film’s runtime, you’re convinced that everyone is freaking out because this guy is a beekeeper, prompting you to wonder why this occupation commands such respect in this particular universe. Multiple exchanges leave you wondering if director David Ayer is taking an unexpectedly arch approach, effectively winking at the audience and admitting that this entire premise is maybe a little silly. Beekeepers don’t strike me as the type of profession that attracts military-grade hardasses, after all.
However, the film pulls the rug from beneath this notion with the revelation that Clay once belonged to a paramilitary operation called The Beekeepers. Dedicated to maintaining order and justice and operating outside of the law, they’re deployed to handle situations that conventional legal and military channels can’t officially manage. Upon retirement, Clay apparently needed to replicate the buzz (sorry) by becoming an actual beekeeper. It’s a little too on-the-nose and derivative of so many other action films with rugged semi-retired protagonists who are dragged back into the fray. I think it would have been much more interesting—and funnier—if this guy was just a beekeeper with preternatural fighting skills that allow him to plow through the dozens of henchmen and government lackeys he encounters on his way to the top of this conspiracy. But because we live in a world where every narrative device has to be accounted for, this guy can’t just be a beekeeper—he has to be part of a shadowy organization that dispatches random assassins, not unlike the world of JOHN WICK.
Luckily, the film is no less a hoot following this revelation, and that’s probably the third and most important thing you need to know about THE BEEKEEPER: it rocks in a very specific manner, something approaching the intersection between the TNT dad movie canon and vintage vigilante movies. It’s Donald Westlake’s PARKER (a familiar realm for Statham) for guys who dig MMA and Affliction t-shirts, a movie for guys who like movies but with the faintest whiff of classic, paranoiac anti-authoritarianism. It imagines a world not unlike our own, where the strongest prey upon the weakest, but it proposes a solution that’s pure fantasy, that one man can be the magic bullet that topples the entire conspiracy. Statham is well-suited for this avenging role because he carries himself with a dual conviction: you absolutely believe he’s capable of whipping all of this ass, but, more importantly, you believe he feels compelled to do so. Like so many of his fellow action stars (past and present), Statham is vulnerable enough to convince you that Clay isn’t just a mindless killing machine but rather a genuinely aggrieved member of society who’s had enough of this shit.
Without this dynamic, THE BEEKEEPER would be standard action movie stuff; with it, it’s a delirious fantasia of redemptive and restorative violence where Statham dispatches the worst elements in society: predatory capitalists, corrupt government officials, and the militaristic mercenaries protecting both. Ayer surrounds his star with an impressive rogues gallery of weasels, slimeballs, and brutes to fully indulge the pulp fantasy on display. There’s no room for nuance here: there’s Clay and his virtuous allies and then there’s the unrepentant scum he winds up scraping off of his shoes.
Leading the charge is Hutcherson as the vile, petulant CEO who oozes entitlement—you sense that this is the first time in his life he’s ever faced consequences. Likewise, the lackey bro who runs one of his call centers (David Witts) seems downright appalled that anyone would dare question or challenge his deranged quest to rob people blind. Watching these two squirm is especially delightful because they’re avatars for so much of our modern malaise with regards to rampant capitalism; meanwhile, Irons also relishes playing the shady government official allowing them to thrive. Colorful assassins, like a fellow agent (Megan Le) who rolls up on Clay firing a gatling gun at a gas station, and a cocky Secret Service Agent (Taylor James), provide more flourishes, further rooting THE BEEKEEPER in the pulp tradition, allowing it to engage in gnarly, grisly violence that ends with shards of glass tearing through arteries and Statham severing his victims’ extremities.
Ayer treats the material just seriously enough that its more outlandish elements feel more like embellishments rather than tonal clashes, and, while everything doesn’t work here (a subplot involving Eloise’s daughter—herself an FBI agent—feels like extraneous, glib buddy cop fluff), it’s not for lack of trying. THE BEEKEEPER is deliriously ambitious: when Clay torches the offending call center during the first act, it becomes obvious that it has its sights set on a grander scope and scale than you might expect from a standard revenge thriller. By the end, it’s essentially become an episode of 24, complete with an elaborate infiltration and the high stakes moral dilemmas that once defined that show. But it also has one thing the show never did: an abundance of bee-related dialogue and puns as our hero plucks out the rotten, rogue hive infesting the American government.
Tags: Bobby Naderi, David Ayer, David Witts, Emmy Raver-Lampman, Gabriel Beristain, Jason Statham, Jeremy Irons, Josh Hutcherson, Kurt Wimmer, Megan Le, Parker, Phylicia Rashad, Taylor James, The Beekeeper
No Comments