A Jason Statham movie with most everything that portends, meaning THE BEEKEEPER (2024) won’t ever be mistaken for CITIZEN KANE. It is, however, better than most other Statham movies, with high-profile support from actors like Minnie Driver and Jeremy Irons, a script by action movie specialist Kurt Wimmer (EQUILIBRIUM) and direction by Hollywood A-lister David Ayer (FURY).
The title character is Adam Clay (Statham), a dedicated beekeeper who rents space for his hives in the barn of a widowed old woman named Eloise Parker (Phylicia Rashad). One day Eloise is scammed by a telephone outfit that drains her bank accounts, driving her to suicide. Clay, after being harassed by Eloise’s FBI agent daughter Verona (Emmy Raver-Lampman), tracks down the source of the outfit, a call center located in an opulent office building, and blows it up.
This inspires a retaliation from the center’s manager Mickey (David Witts) and some goons—of whom Clay, who proves quite proficient in all forms of combat, makes short work. This alerts Derek Danforth (Josh Hutcherson), who runs the outfit, and former CIA director Wallace Westwyld (Irons), who works for Danforth. Westwyld delves into Clay’s past and discovers he’s a member of a clandestine government program that takes its inspirations from bees and their society, with its main objective being to protect the hive—or as Clay puts it, “You have laws for these things until they fail. Then you have me.”
The scumbaggery, it turns out, stretches to Derek’s mother Jessica Danforth (Jemma Redgrave), who happens to be the President of the United States. Not to worry, though, because the indestructible Clay is certain to track every permutation of Derek’s evil and burn it all down.
Ayer directs with slickness and efficiency, and demonstrates a strong grasp of action moviemaking (although making out precisely what’s happening during the intricate fight scenes isn’t always easy). The themes explored, which include corporate greed, political corruption and a female president, in conjunction with cinematographer Gabriel Beristain’s burnished lighting, suggest that Ayer and Wimmer might have had pretentions to Important Cinema, although the emphasis is on violence and sensation, this being a movie that first and foremost knows its place.
Statham essentially plays the same taciturn killing machine he always does, a personage whose defining trait is that he knows how to fight. Irons goes through the motions of a generic bad guy role (which has essentially become his stock-in-trade), although Wimmer and Ayer deserve credit for coming up with a cinematically novel source of evil in the form of an amoral call center, with David Witts and Josh Hutcherson making for appropriately hissable backup villains.
Watching Statham methodically stalk and take down these assholes is undeniably satisfying, although there’s an overriding problem stretching back to the classic action films, and fiction, of yore: the hero is so superhumanly strong and resourceful there’s never any suspense, as we know he’ll be able to handily fight his way out of any scrape he gets himself into.
Vital Statistics
THE BEEKEEPER
Miramax/Cedar Park
Director: David Ayer
Producer: Bill Block, Jason Statham, David Ayer, Chris Long, Kurt Wimmer
Screenplay: Kurt Wimmer
Cinematography: Gabriel Beristain
Editing: Geoffrey O’Brien
Cast: Jason Statham, Emmy Raver-Lampman, Josh Hutcherson, Bobby Naderi, Minnie Driver, David Witts, Michael Epp, Taylor James, Jemma Redgrave, Enzo Cilenti, Phylicia Rashad, Jeremy Irons, Don Gillet, Sophia Feliciano, Enzo Clienti