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Director:David Ayer
Writer:Kurt Wimmer
Stars:Jason StathamEmmy Raver-LampmanBobby Naderi
The Beekeeper Full Movie Review
Statham pays the proverbial Beekeeper in The Beekeeper, protecting the hive (society) by slaying the queen (President Danforth, played by Jemma Redgrave), because she produced “the wrong kind of offspring” (Josh Hutcherson). Hutcherson plays Derek Danforth, the First Failson and owner of a company that stole all of Phylicia Rashad’s money using CIA data mining software. Statham is Adam Clay, a mysterious recluse who lives in Phylicia Rashad’s barn making artisanal honey.
There’s an effortless poetry to the idea of a movie called “The Beekeeper” opening on the protagonist keeping bees, form and function expressed seamlessly. Manny Farber, the critic who coined the term “termite art” had to be fist pumping from the grave. It’s termite art about bees!
One of the next scenes sees Clay shocking the hornets to death with a stun gun attached to a fluorescent light bulb, presumably going way above and beyond normal hornet euthanasia methods. The implication is clear: this man will torture *insects* to death to protect the hive (society). So when some evil call center guys steal money from Phylicia Rashad (“the only person who ever took care of me,” Clay calls her) and bankrupt her children’s charity, you immediately start to extrapolate from the hornet torture.
Part of the fun of any Jason Statham is imagining how he’s going to kill an army of bad guys gruesomely and then watching him do it. He clearly has a particular set of skills, but what are they?
Part of the fun of any Kurt Wimmer movie is the lore, whether it’s Queen Slayers, the Ozaki Eight, or Gun Kata. The Beekeeper is like a B-movie hydra, an enjoyably uneasy mix of Statham’s persona, Wimmer’s lore, and director David Ayer’s Papa Roach-esque aesthetic (you may remember Ayer as the writer of Training Day, the director of the Suicide Squad before last, and the director of The Tax Collector, the role that inspired Shia LaBeouf to get a giant “CREEPER” tattoo across his stomach). The Beekeeper is an extended bee metaphor because of Kurt Wimmer; it’s about a reclusive badass because of Jason Statham; and Statham’s character looks like he just stepped off a loading dock because of David Ayer. Nothing wrong with that, though I could’ve done with more bee puns.
Statham’s first gruesome kill is the douchebag manager of the evil call center (an evil call center network, perfect action movie device), who were pumping each other up Boiler Room-style while they emptied Phylicia Rashad’s bank accounts. Statham first cuts the guy’s fingers off with a band saw, and then attaches him to the back of Statham’s pick-up truck with a load lock and then drives it off a pier, yanking the fingerless douche behind it and dragging him down into the briny deep. That’s pretty hard to beat, as B-movie vengeance killings go. They probably shouldn’t have led with that.
Meanwhile, Phylicia Rashad’s daughter, who turns out to be an FBI agent, is hot on Clay’s tail, even though she seems to hate his victims just as much as he does (they bankrupted her mom, after all). Emmy Raver-Lampman plays Agent Verona Parker, a Joss Whedony millennial smart aleck who seems like she escaped from a different movie. Though in her defense, most of the characters in The Beekeeper feel like they escaped from different movies.
