Though it may be easy to reductively and simplistically view it as such, David Ayer’s The Beekeeper is not John Wick. Chad Stahelski may have inspired a slew of films following the same vaguely sketched outline each with their own novel twist; but Ayer’s effort follows less in the footsteps of prestige Eastern heroic bloodshed and more in those of ‘00s video store VHS scuzz, DTV schlock shot on an Arri Alexa and put on the biggest screens possible. Treating its increasingly absurd premise with searing sincerity, it’s almost as refreshingly delightful as Wick first was in 2014, only it’s putting new life into its own form of seemingly forgotten action, one where you could feasibly flood an entire film with apiarist puns and colony dynamic metaphors and still bee a finely tuned action vehicle.
Starring cinema’s favorite gruff bruiser Jason Statham as the CIA’s most highly trained asset turned vengeful beekeeper, Ayer’s film carries itself with a propulsively ludicrous narrative, a fuse lit when sweet philanthropist Eloise Parker (Phylicia Rashād) falls for a predatory phishing scam and loses millions of her charity’s money. When she takes her own life in shame and the authorities offer little hope of retribution, beekeeper and estate resident Adam Clay takes matters into his own hands. As obscenely stupid as it is deadly serious about every motion it takes from there, it all spirals out into neo-tech conglomerate conspiracy and intelligence agency politics, as many cheap familiar thrills as there are brutal, bone-snapping action sequences.
The details are pretty muddy and eventually all sort of slough together, because they never really matter, but it’s all played with just the right degree of reflexive awareness that doesn’t tilt into either exhaustively numbing or obnoxiously smarmy. Millennial tech billionaire Derek Danforth (an inspired and perfect name for a rich, coked up nepo kid skateboarding around the top floor of a skyscraper to get to an appointment with his spiritualist) has a network of data analysts and call centers specifically designed to scam working class Americans into draining their bank accounts directly to him. His political connections and comically garish wealth allow him to both figuratively and literally get away with murder, skirting the rules and abusing military tech for his own gain. Though it’s all surrounded by a labyrinthine plotting involving a lightly uninspired FBI procedural trying to piece together the disparate parts of secret black ops programs and dirty government money with a cold Jeremy Irons lending gravely gravitas to his cartoon villain, the core and scope of it all is pretty clear within the first act. Thankfully, that’s never a problem, because it gleefully revels in its reveals as if it knows you’ve already figured it out. By the time it arrives, you just soak in the dramatic musical stings and sweeping camera motions with joy.
It gets far too lost in the politics for its own good, though it’s completely incapable of wielding any of its ideas as stylistic indictments of the system as if it were Tony Scott leveling the Patriot Act surveillance state or corrupt federal regulatory bodies. Thankfully it also never feels like it’s anywhere close to wielding anything at all, so though the ultimate implications of its final act and its regressive attitudes feel like they’ve completely forgotten every aspect of our entire political landscape, in the midst of its copious bloody brawls and straight-faced monologues about how Clay is a bee, it doesn’t really feel important.
The Beekeeper is the perfect vehicle for Statham, the only man who could convincingly sell the likes of Crank (2006) and The Meg (2018) as well as memorably stand out in less than ten seconds of Collateral (2004), who here manages to truly embody the repeated refrain that compares his character to a honeybee without a viscous, golden drop of irony. Not the kind of reprised contemporary action star fighting through every bruise and laceration with bloody grit, the beekeeper is more of an espionage superhero, a chameleonic Agent 47 that hits like a brick. His hilariously and impossibly adept ferocity make it a constant gleeful delight whenever he makes his way on screen for another series of beatdowns and violent Looney Tunes traps. It’s a shame the film can’t quite commit to the second part of the repeated bee comparison that notes his willingness to sacrifice himself for the cause, but maybe we will end up with a stone cold globe-trotting masterpiece in 2033 when The Beekeeper: Chapter 4 kicks Statham down 15 flights of steps.