The Beekeeper

Going Apiary

The Beekeeper
Directed by David Ayer
USA/UK
2024 Miramax
UK Cinema Print

Not to be confused with the many, many movies which have had the same title over the years (why do Hollywood keep doing this?), The Beekeeper is the latest Jason Statham action movie and, it’s one of his better ones, I’d have to say.

The plot is simple, Statham, who has retired and is an apiarist, rents a barn for his bees from a benevolent lady who is the only person who has ever shown him kindness. Then she gets scammed out of all her money by an online fraudster, part of a huge team of them working in group premises dotted around America, including the 2 million dollars she was managing for a charity. So she shoots herself. 

Enter her daughter, played by Emmy Raver-Lampman, an FBI agent who is trying to crack the gang and follow back the chain but, she’s having no luck. However, Statham is no ordinary retiree... he used to be a ‘beekeeper’... a shady organisation working above the law (most of the FBI and CIA don’t even know these people exist) who are there to ‘protect the hive’ and redress the balance when injustice is done. So, he goes on a rampage, killing and destroying his way to the top of the chain, pursued by the criminals themselves (for a while, they are mostly just trying to stay alive), the various law enforcement agencies, one of the active beekeepers and even his friend’s daughter, as he follows the chain right to the top.

And it’s great. Firstly, this is a solid Statham action thriller but it’s a heck of a lot grimmer and relentless (and wildly entertaining) compared to a fair amount of his other films. And the tone extends right back into Statham’s character, Adam Clay, who is not a typical anti-hero for this actor and couldn’t, for a moment, be mistaken for a bunch of his other, almost interchangeable action roles. This is one of those movies that shows that Statham really is as good an actor as he is a likeable personality (and star), his social skills being dialled back down almost to zero (even with people he likes) as he plays a somewhat unstoppable killing machine.

And that’s the other thing about this character... he doesn’t come out of any scrap in this badly, apart from taking some damage in a big fight with a truly tough guy played by Taylor James near the end of the film. He’s one of those invincible people who can walk into a room filled to the brim with trained FBI killers and wipe them all out within a matter of minutes, using only his bare hands and whatever he can pick up off the floor (and with whatever weapon he can steal from an opponent). Honestly, taking this back to schoolboy mentality for a second, I have no idea who would win in a fight between Adam Clay and John Wick, to be honest.

So, yeah, remember those brilliant Lone Wolf and Cub films of the 1970s... or the Zatoichi films of the 1960s/70s etc? Where the lone figure would take on hundreds of trained warriors and kill them all with barely a scratch? Same thing here. The writers have gone back to the roots of heroic adventure stories and given us one of those invincible characters who can cut through anything, in this case in quite a cynical and grim manner. Now, the trap with this kind of writing is that you can write yourself into a corner when you have nothing to really threaten a protagonist with, which was always the real Kryptonite for those early Superman comics. Here, though, just like Lester Dent did in his original Doc Savage pulps, the writers manage to get away with it and it just works marvellously well.

And, of course, the acting is credible and equally entertaining. And I just loved that it took me a while to realise the president of the United States was played by Jemma Redgrave (who I and, probably many readers, would best recognise as playing Brigadier Alistair Lethbridge-Stuart’s daughter Kate, who took over UNIT in the modern version of Doctor Who). And Jeremy Irons adds a good presence to the movie too, playing a somewhat three dimensional character with an interesting history. And all of this is packaged together with an incredibly good score co-composed by Jared Michael Fry and David Sardy, which includes an outstanding opening title piece where the various facts about bees on the visuals are matched with various strings to musically represent their buzzing. I wish they’d release this thing into the wild, preferably on a nice physical CD so I can have a listen.

And that’s me done with The Beekeeper, I think. I enjoyed this one a lot and, if this is the first of a franchise (which doesn’t have to feature Statham as the lead each time but, it would sure be better if it did), then I am all for it and would love to see some more of this kind of action writing in modern cinema.