Best of 2024: Jason Statham's Wonderfully Ridiculous The Beekeeper is Both a B Movie and a Bee Movie

It's the badass Ulee's Gold sequel we never knew we needed!

I should probably be deeply invested in the musical version of Mean Girls for reasons that will become apparent in the weeks ahead. Yet I nevertheless very much wanted The Beekeeper to win this week’s paid subscriber poll to determine which new movie I would watch and write about this weekend.

Why? I suppose it’s because I am a Jason Statham fan. The Crank movies? I fucking love them. They’re two of my all-time favorite action movies. I also dig the Fast and the Furious franchise, which I wrote about for this newsletter.

I’m also a huge fan of action movies with preposterous premises, and this one is a doozy. So the idea of Jason Statham starring in a movie where he plays a beekeeper who kills many people in a blood-splattered quest for vengeance was irresistible.

The Beekeeper looked like the kind of shameless, high-concept trash I fucking love and have made a career out of celebrating.

I was right! The Beekeeper gave me exactly what I was looking for and that, on a soul-deep level, I needed.

Suicide Squad and Bright director David Ayer’s comeback movie opens with a nice old lady, played by Phylicia Rashad, falling victim to slick online scam artists.

As an educator and a woman of distinction, she should probably be too smart to fall for that kind of cyber-grift, but she is an old woman and, consequently, easy prey.

The ghouls succeed in emptying out all of the poor woman’s accounts in a matter of minutes, including a charity account worth millions. She is so distraught that she commits suicide.

The evil bastards who stole the poor woman’s life savings probably would have gotten away with it if the woman did not have a warm, motherly relationship with Adam Clay (Statham), an unassuming man who just wants to be left alone so that he can tend to his beloved bees and their hives.

Statham is an actual beekeeper, but, and this is the kind of twist that makes cinema the greatest and most important of all art forms, he also belongs to a secretive organization called The Beekeepers.

The Beekeepers keep the world safe by acting with absolute impunity. These badasses don’t just have a license to kill; they have permission to do any damn thing they please. If they want to nuke a small city in the northeast, they have unofficial official permission to do so.

How wonderful is that? I’m not sure whether it’s a coincidence that Clay is a beekeeper and also a Beekeeper or if the idea of beekeeping so inspired him as a metaphor for his deadly work as the most secret of secret agents that he decided to take it up as a hobby. Or maybe he was already a beekeeper; consequently, the idea of joining an organization with the same name appealed to him.

When Clay figures out the reason why his only friend took her life, he embarks on a corpse-strewn mission of vengeance. In The Beekeeper, Statham does what he does best: kill hundreds of people and deliver lots of earnest speeches about how wrong it is to take advantage of the elderly, the vulnerable, and the naive.

The Beekeeper is a movie wholly devoid of moral ambiguity. It never questions for a moment the rightness of Statham killing a small country’s population in his quest for vengeance.

Clay is never anything other than good. He’s also considerate enough to inform the bad guys that he’s going to murder them before taking their lives. If that weren’t enough, he also informs potential collateral damage that if they do not want to be killed by him, they should leave wherever they are immediately.

That, friends, is what my people call a mensch.

Statham’s hairless avenger is so angry that he decides to righteously kill everyone he holds responsible, and there are many people involved for Clay to kill.

He shows up at one call center, talks tough, acts tough, and burns the whole place to the ground.

That gets the attention of Derek Danforth, the film’s eminently hiss-worthy villain. In a career-best performance, Josh Hutcherson plays the bad guy as a cross between Jesse Pinkman, Patrick Bateman, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and Hunter Biden.

Hutcherson delivers a very effective, convincing performance in that I wanted to punch him right in his smug fucking face every moment that he’s onscreen.

The Hunter Biden/Donald Trump Jr. comparison is appropriate because Derek is a sleazy and debauched child of privilege intent on drinking and free-basing and fucking his way through a low life wholly devoid of actual achievement.

Another commonality between Hunter Biden and Derek Danforth is that they’re both the bad seed progeny of THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.

The Beekeeper is deeply satisfying on a scene-by-scene basis. The fight choreography is clean and forceful, and the storytelling is elegant in its simplicity. But honestly, I would have recommended it solely on the basis of the hero being both a literal beekeeper and part of a secret, world-saving organization known as the Beekeepers and the bad guy turning out to be the president’s son.

THAT friends, is how a Jason Statham movie distinguishes itself from all of the other movies where the Snatch star beats the crap out of an army of poorly differentiated heavies for a good cause.

The Beekeeper is so ridiculous and over-the-top that it doesn’t need the live-wire energy Statham brought to his performances in Crank and Crank 2: High Voltage. Instead, Statham grounds the action.

Clay is at once a working-class bloke AND the world’s greatest super-assassin. Clay versus the entire government, including the Secret Service, is not a fair fight because Clay has the advantage.

A slumming Jeremy Irons brings his A game to this over-achieving B movie (or rather bee-movie) as Wallace Westwyld, a D.C powerbroker cursed with having to protect Hutcherson’s evil little shit from himself and the consequences of his actions.

Irons elevates the material with his arthouse gravitas. It would be easy for him to phone it in, but he seems genuinely engaged by his character and the weird world of power and danger he inhabits.

The Beekeeper is full of transcendently bonkers set-pieces like a riveting scene where the Powers That Be sends another Beekeeper to kill Clay. She’s an amazing throwback from a 1984 Cannon exploitation movie, a badass dominatrix cyborg killing machine with a New Wave fashion sense.

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I kind of wanted this character to be the new focus of the film. I couldn’t get enough of her or her flashy shtick, but The Beekeeper is done with her in just a few moments. Oh well. If the film succeeds, she’ll get a spin-off prequel.

The Beekeeper is a good illustration of what makes Statham special as well as a gloriously excessively, wonderfully ridiculous motion picture.

I was going to give it three and a half stars, but I kept remembering things that I loved. I had a whole lot of fun with The Beekeeper. It’s a whole lot of unpretentious fun. So, if you’re thinking that this looks like the best kind of goofy, over-the-top macho bloodbath, then you are exactly right.

Four of Five Stars