The Beekeeper (2024)

The Beekeeper (2024)

Starring: Jason Statham, Emmy Raver-Lampman, Josh Hutcherson, Bobby Naderi, Minnie Driver, Phylicia Rashad, Jeremy Irons
Director: David Ayer
Action Director: Jeremy Marinas

It was on any one of The Critical Drinker’s videos, probably his review of A Working Man, where he basically said that Jason Statham had become this generation’s Steven Seagal. Although his action movies have been reasonably successful—I think this one was his most, raking in over 160 million dollars on a 40-million-dollar budget—they do have a certain degree of “saminess” that Seagal’s films have. You know, the one where Statham plays a former special forces/CIA badass who’s living the quiet life, until something compels him to get back in the game and crush skulls, which his character can do better than everybody else around him. You know the drill.

This one has an especially “interesting” premise.

When we meet Adam Clay (Statham, of The Expendables and The Transporter), he is working as a beekeeper at the estate of retired teacher Eloise Parker (Phylicia Rashad, best known as Claire Huxtable on “The Cosby Show”). Parker lives out in the sticks away from her daughter, mainly running a children’s charity with her free time. She also cooks and “takes care of” Adam, which makes the quiet loner especially grateful.

One evening, Eloise Parker is on her laptop when a window pops up declaring that the data on her computer has been compromised and that her data is in danger. She calls the Hot Line, which puts her in contact with Mickey Garnett (David Witts, who later had small role in A Working Man), the manager of a data scamming outfit that preys on the elderly, robbing them of their retirement, savings, inheritances, etc. Mickey “helpfully” gets Eloise to install some shady software, which allows his employees to hack into her computer and clean out all her accounts, including 20 million dollars from the charity. Parker doesn’t take it so well: she shoots herself that same evening.

When Adam Clay shows up at the house to check in on her, he comes across her dead body and is immediately mistaken for her killer by Verona (Emmy Raver-Lampman, who mainly works in theater, but will return for this movie’s sequel), Eloise’s FBI agent daughter. She has Adam arrested, although forensic testing quickly rules out foul play and her mother’s death is declared to be a suicide. Verona did happen to look at the laptop and see the name of the data company that Eloise had called, which she passes onto Adam.

At this point, we get to the part we all were expecting. Adam pulls a secret phone out of a beehive (heh) and calls his old employers, asking for a favor: find the address of the data company. It takes a little while, but these are Ops of the Blackest Sort, so they can get [shiz] done. Adam pays them a visit, beating up all the security guards and burning the rather large building to the ground. At this point, Mickey is forced to bring the matter to his boss, Derek Danforth (Josh Hutcherson, of the Hunger Games movies). Danforth is head of Danforth Enterprises, a company that used to belong to his father, but has since lapsed to the son and his (unseen at the moment) mother. The company runs multiple businesses, all of which are meant to run tech support scams.

Danforth tells Mickey to “handle” the situation, which results in him and some Hired Goons going to Parker’s house, burning it down, and following Clay to the barn he rents. As we might expect in a Jason Statham movie, Clay kills the hired help and lets Mickey go, albeit minus four fingers. From this point, Clay takes his fight to Danforth, although not before killing Mickey by putting him into a bungee vest, strapping the cord to a truck, and running the truck off a bridge. Wouldn’t have been easier just to have killed him back at the barn?

But all of Clay’s rhetoric about “protecting the hive” gets back to Danforth. He tells his “conservator”, Wallace Westwyld (Jeremy Irons), about the situation. Westwyld is a former CIA director and (I think) may have been Danforth’s stepfather for a while, but now he just babysits the young punk…or bails him out when his penchant for drugs and hookers gets him in trouble. That said, Westwyld is well aware that the term “Beekeeper” is Intelligence jargon for something really bad, which at one point results in Westwyld giving Danforth the “John Wick Speech”…or the Col. Trautman speech.

Westwyld calls in a favor to the current CIA chief, Janet Harward (Minnie Driver, of Grosse Pointe Blank), and asks her to help them. She contacts the Beekeepers and accuses Clay of being a rogue agent. When their own assassin (Megan Le) cannot stop him, the CIA has no choice but to get their best men together and stop Clay. At the same time, the FBI (led by Verona) is on Clay’s trail, too. And when we learn the truth about Danforth and his family connections, several other intelligence agencies will end up getting involved, too.

So, what is a Beekeeper? It is essentially an intelligence agency working on the periphery (or perhaps even farther away) from the likes of the FBI, CIA, or NSA. One might say that they are forever working in “Ghost Protocol” mode and basically answer to nobody but themselves. They have the right to eliminate any entity they see as a threat to the good ol’ US of A (“the hive”) with no bureaucracy to stand in their way. Adam Clay is a former Beekeeper, which is why he can kick so much ass, even before he starts using a gun.

That is a very Steven Seagal movie plot. Former CIA black ops agent? Unbeatable in combat? A government conspiracy and intelligence agents trying to silence him? You get that in most of Seagal’s movies. The main difference between Seagal and Statham is that the latter has a lot of natural charisma and, in the 25 years or so since he became an action actor, Statham has stayed in reasonably good shape. Yes, he more or less plays the same character in all his movies—although his British crime movies and some of his earlier films allowed him some more leeway—but if it’s not broke, don’t fix it.

I do find it interesting how the story in this one gradually grows in scope. It starts off with Statham taking on a single computer data center. He then takes his fight to the parent company. By the end, he is practically facing off with the entire US government and all of its major intelligence agencies. When one of the characters picks up a book on beekeeping and reads about a bee whose job it is to kill the queen when the current one can no longer perform her function, it is supposed to be foreshadowing that Clay may very well take his fight to the President (themselves).

If you like this kind of action movie, you should enjoy The Beekeeper. The action scenes were staged by Jeremy Marinas, who is best known for his work on John Wick 4 and From the World of John Wick: The Ballerina. Most of the fight scenes are very short, with Statham dispatching a roomful of baddies in a few punches each, with the occasional front kick or side kick thrown for good measure. His enemies do “level up” as the film progresses: security guards -> hired goons -> FBI SWAT team -> CIA Swat Team -> the best mercenaries in the world. If you like Jason Statham and his screen fighting skills, there is no reason to not like this movie. There is a lot of action and it’s all well staged. The main thing is that Statham is nearly invincible in this, only taking damage in his fight with the head of the mercenaries, Lazarus (Taylor James).

The violence is often quite graphic, such as him blowing up an elevator, which results in one character getting bisected when it falls down the shaft. And yet…the sequel is being directed by Indonesian director Timo Tjahjanto. That guy did the hyper-violent movies Headshot; The Night Comes For Us; and Shadow Strays (which may be the worst of the three). So, I can see The Beekeeper 2 getting spectacularly violent.

My main qualm with this film was the profanity. Although I'm not totally against it, this one had so many F-bombs being dropped that it became distracting. I accept that sort of thing in a 90s "In the hood" films or a Tarantino movie, but in a fun, check-your-brain-at-the-door actioner, you don't need 100+ uses of the word f*ck.

Statham is now pushing 60 and shows no signs of slowing down. The year after this, he did A Working Man, which brought in 89 million on a similar budget to this. This year he has given us Shelter, which didn’t do as well as his previous two films, and will soon release Mutiny, which will be Statham’s Under Siege (at least in general premise). Plus he has the sequel to this one due out next year. I really have to applaud Statham for keeping up this action hero shtick for as long as he has. Too bad that by the time he reaches Stallone’s age, we’ll probably no longer have any action heroes of his caliber to do an Expendables reboot.