Bees have had a bad run of it on screen. For every Candyman, there is a Jupiter Ascending; for every film like the award-winning 2019 Macedonian documentary Honeyland, there is Nicolas Cage screaming, “Killing me won’t bring back your goddamn honey!” in The Wicker Man. David Ayer’s The Beekeeper, the latest action vehicle for Jason ‘The Stath’ Statham, doesn’t exactly give everyone’s favourite pollinating insects a glittering moment on the silver screen. But if nothing else, it certainly mentions them a lot.
Here, Statham plays a retired member of ‘Beekeepers’: one of those extrajudicial super-spy government agencies you often see in films like this, the kind that gets the job done when no-one else can (see also: Mission: Impossible’s IMF; Heart Of Stone’s The Heart; The A-Team). For some reason, his public life — a terrible cover! — is also as an _actual_beekeeper, just to ram the whole bee idea home.
The script, by Kurt Wimmer (also partly responsible for Statham’s last film, the risible Expend4bles), never misses an opportunity to remind us that bees are the key theme. “You've been a busy bee,” notes one character. “You kicked the beehive and now we have to reap the whirlwind,” says another. “Who the fuck are you, Winnie-The-Pooh?” is one of the better lines. A valiant attempt at an old-fashioned action-movie one-liner, meanwhile, is catastrophically inept: “To be or not to be” earns the comeback, “To bee!”, an exchange which makes zero sense even in a film that has over-strenuously dedicated itself to bees.
The action scenes are horribly inconsistent: fine in the hand-to-hand stuff, sloppy elsewhere.
The script, and Ayer’s direction, seem desperate to want to be in on the joke. The sad truth is, with bee analogies more tortuous than the Stath’s killing methods, you’re far more likely to be laughing at it than with it. Almost entirely witless, it’s as if they’ve decided on the title first, and then had to retrofit a cheapo action movie around the theme of bees. So much just doesn’t make sense: why is the former director of the CIA talking about honey? Why is an FBI special agent discussing pollination methods?
It is impressive and noteworthy that Statham can somehow make a beekeeping outfit look macho. But even he can’t elevate this stuff. Like his Hobbs & Shaw co-star Dwayne Johnson, there’s a kind of repetitive homogeneity to Statham’s roles: all seemingly interchangeable tough guys, all with the same strange mid-Atlantic snarl (“There’s some British Isles hiding in your accent,” notes one character kindly), the same carefully cultivated stubble, the same implacable grimace, the same impervious-to-bullets efficiency.
Statham is as gruffly convincing as he usually is (though it’s 20 minutes before he’s even allowed to kick any ass), but the action scenes are horribly inconsistent: fine in the hand-to-hand stuff, sloppy elsewhere. It’s all wildly over-edited and wildly over-lit, too, like the worst of Michael Bay’s vices, and it’s very hard to care about any of the fights, given we know so little about any of the characters: just The Stath, grimly dispatching faceless, endless bad guys with impunity, as is his wont. If that’s all you’re after, you should be satisfied — but you do have to put up with quite a lot of stuff about bees, too.
