Film Review – The Beekeeper (2024)

Action cinema hasn’t perhaps been the same since its heyday in the 1980s given how the world has changed and things that could be considered “targets” can’t be in the same way anymore. Stallone and Schwarzenegger are still plying their trades on the small screen, of course, while Bruce Willis has retired due to his illness. However, despite this, the latest school of action heroes is still percolating across theatrical and home formats – perhaps the most prominent these days – but none is perhaps as popular as a certain former Commonwealth England national diver and market-stall maestro from Derbyshire, who brings us his latest thrill-ride quest for justice while taking on his most humanistic character yet – a beekeeper.

Said keeper of bees is Adam Clay, a seemingly ordinary man who has been helping his neighbour, Eloise (Phylicia Rashad), with her bee problem. Soon, he finds that Eloise has committed suicide after falling for a sophisticated phishing scam that sees her lose all of her money, including millions in a charity fund she was responsible for. Clay, as you may imagine, isn’t best pleased by this turn of events and takes it upon himself to exact his unique brand of vengeance on those responsible, a trail that leads him, surprisingly, to the inner circle of the new President of the United States and her former employees. Their names? You guessed it. A secret government organisation called Beekeepers. The plot, like adding water to honey, dilutes.

There perhaps isn’t anyone who can rival the output of action cinema’s new hero, Jason Statham: this is his fifth film in the last twelve months, but with such a wealth of efforts in such a short space of time, is the Brit hardman overdoing it? The Beekeeper, a pretty standard effort from Suicide Squad and Fury director David Ayer, sees Statham once again slipping into the role of avenger and righter of wrongs but, such is his recent volume of work, this one could have quite easily been the one that landed the wrong side of the fun factor and hit the proverbial ground with a thunderous, hollow thud. Thankfully, when The Stath is in this kind of form, it’s impossible to resist. 

To bee or not to bee, indeed. From such descriptions you can probably surmise that The Beekeeper is all kinds of ridiculous and preposterous in equal measure, bordering on parody at times and just one more bee quip away from falling off the cliff with wacky sound effects in tow. Logic and realism, they ain’t present at all here with Ayer and writer Kurt Wimmer essentially just letting Statham do his thing and getting out of the way, even with the ever-increasing nonsense that surrounds him. 

Subtlety, nuance, character, drama: those aren’t here either. They are stuck in the honey tree whilst the pile of bad guys (although some of them aren’t even that bad) that our intrepid beekeeper leaves in his wake continues to escalate. If all this seems like your idea of sweet nectar then you’re in the right place and, for his no-holds-barred, unique brand of heroism, no one does it quite like Statham. But after this bee-movie madness, it’s perhaps time to get some better collaborators. 

★★

In cinemas January 12th / Jason Statham, Josh Hutcherson, Jeremy Irons, Emmy Raver-Lampman, Jemma Redgrave, Phylicia Rashad / Dir: David Ayer / 18 / Sky Cinema Original