On my way out of the screening for The Beekeeper, I stopped to give a studio rep my initial thoughts on the new Jason Statham film.
“It’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen,” I said. “And I don’t know if that’s a criticism.”
A glorious piece of January trash, the flick is a bone-crushing, logic-shattering actioner with world-building so bonkers and a conspiracy so off the rails that it often feels like parody. Despite being dumber than a bag of rocks, it commits so fully to its lunacy that it can’t help but entertain. If it were any better, it would be worse.
Statham is the titular Beekeeper, a quiet man who tends his hives on the land of a kind woman (Phylicia Rashad). When she’s scammed by some Wolf of Wall Street wannabes and loses her entire life savings, she kills herself. This doesn’t sit well with her FBI agent daughter (Emmy Raver-Lampman), and it really irks the Beekeeper, who quickly tracks down the call center that bilked his friend, beats down its security team and burns it to the ground.
You may be realizing right now that this is no regular beekeeper. See, this beekeeper is a BEEKEEPER – an extra-legal security force that the United States keeps on hand to “protect the hive” when the system fails. He’s a super mercenary with unlimited resources, and he sets out to track down the people behind the scammers – most immediately, a sniveling techbro (Josh Hutcherson) and the CEO whose conglomerate funds him (Jeremy Irons). But the conspiracy doesn’t stop there, and part of The Beekeeper’s insipid charm comes from how Kurt Winner’s script ratchets up the stakes to ridiculous levels.
Contrary to what the trailers might suggest, The Beekeeper is not a thriller about a regular guy lashing out against the system. Instead, it’s a low-rent John Wick, in which a bunch of scuzzy dudes mess with someone they think is just an Average Joe but is really a trained weapon of death. 
Directed by David Ayer (Fury, Suicide Squad), the film follows the Wick template, but at Wal-Mart prices. Instead of flashy Eurotrash hanging out in sleek nightclubs, the villains haunt call centers and nondescript offices. There are no puppies killed, but a beehive is laid to waste. The Beekeeper has access to a labyrinthine world of secret agents and codewords, only instead of the slick Continental Hotel, gold coins and The High Table, he’s equipped with honey and bee puns (I’m not making this up; at one point, he sets a henchman on fire with honey).The bad guys pissed him off, and now they’re going to get stung (a pun that, regrettably, does not make it into the movie).
There is no universe in which The Beekeeper can be described as a good movie. In addition to the inanity listed above, there’s also a thudding subplot in which Raver-Lampman’s character and her FBI partner don’t so much investigate The Beekeeper as they sit in their offices following his aftermath and say things along the lines of “this is crazy, right?” Despite Beekeepers being a clandestine organization, these two FBI agents suss out what’s happening in only a day or so, with their only clues being burned-out buildings, dead web scammers and beekeeping manuals. And, while this has no bearing on the plot, Ayer also makes the strange choice to have their conversations take place in an FBI office that looks on the verge of falling apart. In one shot, they discuss the case while a crew is repairing a leaky roof; in other scenes, it appears that all the lights in the building might be off. There’s no reason for this, and yet Ayer had to go through the trouble of hiring background actors to play the repair crew and lighting the offices just so. It further suggests that, with a nudge, this would be a parody of the John Wick films instead of a low-budget homage.
Statham could, of course, choose to play it a bit lighter and lean into the joke – Spy showed that he has a sense of self-awareness and is willing to poke fun at himself. And while he does toss out a few bon mots – even if his constant promises to “protect the hive” draw unintentional titters – much of the humor comes from the way Statham’s stoicism and tough guy posturing push up against the truly crazy places the story takes it, especially early on when he nonchalantly shows up at a call center with two jugs of gasoline and casually says he’s there to burn it down.
Unlike, say, Bob Odenkirk, whose transformation to action star in Nobody was one of its surprising pleasures, Statham has spent two decades kicking ass. And Ayer lets him loose in several bone-crunching sequences. While they don’t have the finesse and ingenuity of anything in the John Wick films, Ayer allows his camera to linger on the movement without cutting away too often, and it’s maybe the most martial arts-centric film Statham’s done since his Transporter days. Ayer keeps upping the ranks by having The Beekeeper plow through henchmen, culminating in an exhausting but exhilarating brawl in a mansion hallway at the film’s end.
While the script flirts with parody, Ayer isn’t really known for his light touch. His resume includes grim and gritty fare like End of Watch, Harsh Times, Fury and Sabotage, and even his more blockbuster-driven work, like Suicide Squad and the Will Smith buddy orc/cop drama Bright, sports a dour machismo. The Beekeeper is lighter on its feet, thanks mainly to the outlandish script and a game cast, but there are hints that Ayers thinks he’s making something more important than a silly genre film. This is, after all, a movie that opens with a senior citizen being bilked and ending her life, and the violence is at times a bit much for the squeamish – one villain gets his fingers sawed off and there’s a death-by-being-tethered-to-a-truck-careening-off-a-cliff scene – and it seems a bit tonally jarring from the over-the-top conspiracy flick that Winner’s script builds.
But like I said, any more cohesion or grounding would probably turn The Beekeeper from an enjoyable January diversion to dull dreck. Part of the fun is the way the film’s heightened tone and grim action clash, creating a movie that is a giant mess but never dull. It also benefits from a cast that brings just enough chops to suggest they’re either in on the joke or winking knowingly for taking a paycheck gig. This is, of course, Statham’s bread and butter (honey butter, of course), and he’s dependably charismatic. But the film gains a lot from Hutcherson’s hateful douchery and Irons’ sniveling contempt. Minnie Driver even shows up for a handful of scenes to provide exposition and then peaces out for the rest of the film. The talent goes a long way toward making the trainwreck watchable.
There’s an argument that any enjoyable movie shouldn’t be considered bad and no pleasure should be labeled “guilty.” But sometimes, those terms are apt. Sometimes a movie is so bafflingly constructed that it becomes enjoyable in ways the filmmaker never intended; sometimes the joy is in the very badness of the thing you’re watching. What I’m trying to say is that The Beekeeper is not exactly sweet as honey, but I’m also not going to tell it to buzz off.
