The Beekeeper
“To be or not to be,” a fluorescent coated, bottle blonde South African mercenary spits at the Jason Statham’s master beekeeper / special forces commando during their final confrontation. That mélange of ideas smashed into your face is all you need to know about David Ayer’s newest action film The Beekeeper or why you should see it. The only thing that could be better, and I hope it is true, is if each infinitive was actually spelled ‘bee’ in the script. (I’m just going to assume that it is and give it another point for audacity). That is the level of silliness at work and it really deserves to be seen to be believed.
A revenge action thriller at heart no different than any other, Beekeeper posits a world filled with terrible people who view their fellow man as resources to be farmed like wheat or carp, and the only way to deal with such people is by force because legal and political systems can’t or won’t do it. Or at least they won’t do it in the thoroughly cathartic manner of hooking the worst person you know to a truck and driving him off a bridge at full speed. Even the government has accepted this reality, creating a group of ‘Beekeepers’ literally above the law whose job is to freelance identify and remove threats to the polity in the most direct manner possible. There is, as there has been with all of these since Death Wish, a troubling border shared with nihilistic fascism where might is the only thing that truly makes right and the only hope is that the ubermensch believes in morals and justice at some level.
Said superman here is, as he should always be, Statham: a former member of the secret Beekeepers who has retired to keep bees because (and this is true of everything in The Beekeeper) the metaphor he lives by is both figurative AND literal. There is no distinction between metaphor and reality, and if for one moment it seems like there might be Ayer and screenwriter Kurt Wimmer will blow it up. When the widower (Rashad) he is renting beekeeping space from loses her life savings in an internet scam Statham takes it upon himself to find the perpetrator and burn their business to the ground as well as anyone connected to it. Uncovering an increasing web of perpetrators leading up to the White House itself, and remembering the beekeepers maxim to run out damaged bees that endanger the hive, Statham takes the bees instinct as his own even if it means killing the President. And in between, many facts about bees are recited. If it turned out the script was 20 pages light and the filmmakers filled it in with excerpts from the Wikipedia page on bees, I would believe it.
Yes, it’s stupid. That’s a good deal of its charm. Considering how much of the film is bathed in neon and over the top nonsense it’s not a large leap to expect the filmmakers know it, too. When Statham finally finds the scammers they are not put upon keyboard warriors stacked in endless rows of cubicles but work in an a neon painted boiler room with club lights and EDM blaring over the speakers while an obnoxious crypto bro yells at them over a megaphone to steal harder. The villains are like reverse huntsman, painted in the brightest, broadest colors possible (the more neon the better) to make sure they easily identified. So when a fellow Beekeeper shows up to put Statham out to pasture and she walks around on stiletto heels with a purple mohawk and a minigun in the back of her truck the only response can be “sure, why not.”
It doesn’t make much sense, with only the smatterings of connective tissue and human beings who cannot react like any sort of human being or even notice how weird everyone around them is behaving. Recognizing the defects and the futility of trying to fix them, Ayer fills his screens with gifted actors who can ramble on nonsense with the best of them so that they can talk a lot about bees. If it was a bet to see how many times Jeremy Irons can be made to say the word ‘bee’ … then it was time well spent. The only one left on the outs is an insouciant Josh Hutcherson as the most entitled, ridiculous of crypt bros whose only job is to be imminently punchable but is not in the least believable as a villain.
Is it all really, really stupid? Yes. It is gloriously, wonderfully, joyously stupid. It may be the dumbest thing made this year. Everyone should see it immediately.
4 out of 10 (but really 8 out of 10)
Starring Jason Statham, Emmy Raver-Lampman, Josh Hutcherson, Jeremy Irons, Jemma Redgrave, Bobby Naderi, David Witts, Megan Le, Taylor James, Minnie Driver and Phylicia Rashad. Directed by David Ayer.