The Beekeeper
Picture this: One of the boiler room scumbags from “The Wolf of Wall Street” has driven Jason Bourne’s mother to bankruptcy. That’s at least somewhat the premise of “The Beekeeper,” whose central figure is a wraithlike ex-commando played by Jason Statham who doles out Old Testament vengeance on tech bros using cutting edge innovations to rob people online.
Statham’s character, Adam Clay, is an MMA upgrade of Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name; we don’t know much about him except that he lives out in the country raising bees and selling their honey. And that he’s played by Statham, so he’s no ordinary beekeeper. His best friend is an older woman named Eloise Parker (Phylicia Rashad), who lives in the farmhouse next to his and rents him space in her barn. According to Adam, she was the only person who ever took care of him. But then she falls for a phishing scam from a data mining company that drains all her money, and the money from a nonprofit she helped found. So Adam trades his beekeeper uniform for commando gear and disguises, working his way up through the criminal food chain doing what the law can’t.
We never quite find out how Eloise came to take care of Adam, or even exactly what he means when he says that. It’s to this film’s credit that it doesn’t elaborate; just as it doesn’t elaborate on who Adam was before we met him here, when he seems like some super duper extra secret commando who has never been fingerprinted and exists outside every known governmental structure and seems (from other characters’ descriptions) kind of like society’s self regulation agent.
The movie is directed by David Ayer (“Suicide Squad,” “Fury”) and written by Kurt Wimmer (who wrote or co-wrote remakes of “The Thomas Crown Affair,” “Point Break” and “Total Recall”). It knows its lead actor’s strengths, which appear to have been earned honestly, and has him do everything from dialogue to martial arts to gunplay as simply as possible.
Statham is the kind of movie star who makes you sit up straight in your seat, and he gets better with every year. This performance builds on his superb work in Guy Ritchie’s “Wrath of Man,” which also asked him to hold an audience’s attention while playing more of an idea than a person. Statham’s matter of factness in “The Beekeeper” only amplifies the impact when Adam tersely speaks of how much Eloise meant to him or waxes philosophical about the organization of the beehive and the need for maintaining a functioning society. There aren’t many action heroes who could deliver a line like “I believe there’s good in the universe” and make you believe that the character believes it let alone that the film does too.
An observation regarding bad guys: They were casted pretty well, which is extremely impressive considering their number. Some of them include Garnett (David Witts): the leader in a boiler room who cheats Eloise herself and brags about sleeping with her to a group of junior vultures with the charm of an ’80s Tom Cruise character; Derek Danforth (Josh Hutcherson): the vice president of a data mining company that’s run by President of the United States Jemma Redgrave’s spoiled, sleazy and coked-out son, Wallace Westwyld (Jeremy Irons) Derek’s boss, a former CIA director who acts like an exasperated cynic straight out of “Veep”; and a mercenary braying wanker (Taylor James) who once killed a guy like Adam and can’t wait to do it again. They’re all morally and/or physically disgusting. Derek looks like he’s been marinating in oat milk, and Hutcherson reads his lines in that preppie teenage snot voice that a lot of trust fund boys never lose even when they enter their fifties. When James’ character gets worked up while insulting Adam, he spits misty plumes of spit. Irons is dressed and lit to exaggerate the royal rotter look that made him so perfect for 1990s black comedies/psychosexual thrillers/horror flicks.
It’s just too bad “The Beekeeper” isn’t the righteous trash masterpiece it keeps threatening to become. There’s definitely a great pop hit in here somewhere probably one that only focuses on Adam and all the awful people he’s going after but sometimes the movie feels scattered or annoyingly glib. There’s also an equally well acted but ultimately unnecessary subplot involving Eloise’s FBI agent daughter Verona Parker (Emmy Raver-Lampman) and her partner Matt Wiley (Bobby Naderi), who want to catch Adam and put him in jail even though Verona’s initial theory about his involvement is instantly proved wrong. Seems like she should see him more as a Dr. Richard Kimble type. The FBI duo has undeniable chemistry, but the buddy cop comedy riffing in their scenes undercuts Verona, who should be as furious about what happened to her mother and focused on Adam as he is.
Even worse, politically and philosophically, the movie wimps out at the end in the way that a lot of vigilante action flicks wimp out by assuring us that the problem isn’t systemic corruption baked into the national character or the human species, but just a few bad apples doing bad stuff without their boss’s knowledge or approval. Even Hollywood genre films that are deeply socially critical tend to lose their nerve this way, they tell us that it’s not systemic and purposeful corruption embedded in our institutions’ very marrow, but anomalous people who need to be removed so things can go back to being noble. There was an opportunity for something truly bold here, and it wasn’t taken. If there’s any working actor who could literally as well as figuratively Burn It All Down and bring audiences cheering to their feet, it’s Statham.
However, when Statham is at his best i.e. dominating the screen by shooting and beating up bad guys and setting large fires “The Beekeeper” can be viewed as a work in the vein of “Billy Jack” or the original “Walking Tall.” It’s a fantasy about how great it would feel to brutalize and kill white collar crooks who victimize innocent people with impunity. While watching “The Beekeeper,” I thought of all the old folks in my life who’ve been ripped off by con artists, estate looters and other scammers, and the cops and judges who wouldn’t lift a finger to help them get justice. How wonderful it would be for every one of them to climb into their cars, glance into their rearview mirrors and see Jason Statham sitting in the back seat.
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