The Beekeeper (2024) March 3rd, 2024

The Beekeeper is a textbook guilty pleasure movie. Schlocky, absurd, and a hell of a lot of fun. Set in an alternate universe where apiarists are badass and Jason Statham is still a movie star, The Beekeeper flies in the face of taste and deserves more buzz.

Statham’s character (he might have a name but who gives a shit?) works on a farm caring for bees and killing wasps to protect the hive. After exterminating a nasty nest, he’s invited to dinner with his employer and landlord. She (probably has a name too but again…) is an elderly woman who lives alone and works from home (maybe?). The lonely and kind Statham accepts her offer and agrees to meet for dinner in a few hours. His landlord heads home and starts dinner just like any other elderly person, by heating up the stove and leaving the kitchen to check her emails in the dining room.

And like so many elderly people before her, this poor woman falls victim to an email phishing scam warning her that her whole life is going to crumble if she doesn’t call the attached number right away! Well, she calls and who answers but a young white techbro wearing a three-piece suit in a scam callcenter that looks like it was designed for a 90’s hacker movie.

That’s right, the main villain of The Beekeeper are the same people preying on the elderly in the real world. Phishing scammers. Our dapper conman coerces our absentminded chef into serving up all her private information granting him access to all her accounts before they transfer all of her liquid wealth to their offshore accounts. When she realizes she’s not only lost all her money, but the entirety of a multimillion dollar fund she managed for someone else, she blows her fucking brains out. Sorry Jason, hope you weren’t hungry.

The titular beekeeper stumbles on the scene with the fire alarm beeping as the food on the stove burns. His employer, dead on the floor. Suddenly the stock SFX sound of a gun cocking clicks and we see a young woman standing behind him with her piece drawn. We quickly learn this woman is the daughter of the deceased who’s convinced Statham murdered her mother. This cop (I’m sure she has a name, I really am) sends him in for questioning while she remains, otherwise emotionless, at the scene. Statham is, of course, not responsible for this woman’s death but that doesn’t mean her cop-daughter is going to let him get away with it (that’s what we call due process).

Somehow (I’m sure this is addressed in the film) Statham figures out the people who scammed her and triggered her suicide are conveniently headquartered in a commercial office building about a half hour from the farm. So he heads over to their offices with a couple cans of gasoline and sets the building on fire. The scammer head honcho is left alive to call his bosses who send assassins to squash our beekeeper. But like, you know where this is going, right? Statham murders them all in a barn with mason jars of flammable honey. Well, almost all of them. He leaves the head honcho alive again but chops off his fingers in a grotesque display of genre film gore.

The Beekeeper proceeds to be yet another self indulgent John Wick knockoff splitting scenes into two categories. World-building scenes establishing the global corruption behind these telephone scammers and those establishing Statham as an unstoppable juggernaut of justice. In the reality of The Beekeeper, Statham is a member of a elite combat force responsible for maintaining the first world’s delicately balanced socioeconomic ecosystem while people like the President of the United States’ son run multimillion dollar scam callcenters.

I just want to take a moment to analyze that last little bit. If the conceit is the Beekeepers are a covert paramilitary organization who keep the global system healthy, then why is the global system so objectively shitty? Are they bad at their jobs? If so, why does everyone treat Statham like he’s a deadlier James Bond? He’s recently retired, are we supposed to believe that’s why everything’s gone to shit? When exactly, was the global system working SO WELL that it justifies his actions as a peace keeping force? Is The Beekeeper secretly a brilliant deconstructive criticism of the CIA’s history of orchestrating regime changes and decades of foreign disruption? I hope not! I’d hope a better movie could do a better job of that than The Beekeeper!

While it isn’t an Oliver Stone film, The Beekeeper is charming in its own right. There are plenty of over the top goofy action moments peppered throughout to see The Beekeeper taking refreshingly reflective shots at itself. My favorite is during a scene where a large SWAT team is securing a building they’re expecting Statham to infiltrate. The lead officer runs his men through their plans, explaining The Beekeeper is expected to come through the roof or the back door or something cliché. Without warning Statham appears, standing in the circle of SWAT officers and explains to them why he isn’t going to do that when he breaks in. He says he’s going through the front door. They’re a little flabbergasted and explain again that he’s going through the roof or the back door without recognizing he’s the guy they’re after. He repeats, “No, I’ve already done that. I’m just going through the front door this time.” Then he beats them up and goes through the front door.

This is what makes The Beekeeper a guilty pleasure. It’s like watching The Naked Gun played straight, it’s absurd and hilarious while not sacrificing any of the spectacles or tropes expected in the genre. While The Beekeeper feels like a movie written during the writer’s strike (Imagine Paul Feig directing an action film) its somehow one of the best modern action films I’ve seen in recent memory. The Beekeeper is a pie in the face of everything I hated about the John Wick franchise’s masturbatory self indulgence.

Please, for God’s sake, watch The Beekeeper. Then tell your friends about how insane and stupid it was. Really amp up how much fun insanely stupid movies can be. If they don’t believe you and won’t go see it then start a blog and write a The Beekeeper review, then send them the link and guilt them into reading it. There’s no way we’re going to get The Beekeeper 2: The Beequel unless there’s a groundswell of support from the ticket buying audience. Hell, make it a meme! Look what that did for Morbius and Madame Web! Don’t let this be the last we hear of The Beekeeper. Do your part!