The Beekeeper-Another Typical Jason Statham Basher
Jason Statham does what he does best-beat up and kill a bunch of people in under two hours of runtime.
Let me start my review by saying that the above image is more interesting than most of the film, The Beekeeper. If Jason Statham’s character could transform into bees, that would be a fascinating superpower. However, that is not the case, though I may keep that idea for one of my upcoming stories. In any event, The Beekeeper, starring Statham, was written by Kurt Wimmer and directed by David Ayer. If you are familiar with the work of any of these men, then you can predict what kind of film is in store for you with The Beekeeper.
Statham stars as Adam Clay, a beekeeper whose services are retained by a retired schoolteacher named Eloise Parker (played by the always delightful Phylicia Rashad). Eloise is the one person who has cared for Clay and stays on the grounds of Eloise’s home. One day, Eloise is banking on her computer and falls victim to a phishing scam. Her money (possibly her life savings) and the money in an account for a charity she manages are stolen. Later on, Clay finds Eloise dead with a fired pistol. Her daughter Verona (Emma Raver-Lampman), an FBI agent, arrives and immediately suspects Clay. Clay is arrested but later set free as it is determined that Eloise committed suicide. Returning to Eloise’s house, a distraught Clay tells Verona that he must protect the hive and leaves. It would seem Clay is referring to his bees. However, he is a retired special operative from the Beekeeper program, a highly clandestine organization of extremely deadly agents. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the plot is the analogy between the Beekeeper program’s purpose and the bees’ role in their colonies. A “beekeeper” is analogous to a queen slayer, a drone that rises to kill the queen to protect the hive’s future. Using his connections, Clay discovers who robbed Eloise and that the immediate group is within a network of scammers, robbing perhaps billions of dollars from people like Eloise. Clay sets out for revenge and will stop at nothing, including interference from Verona and the FBI, until he gets the main culprit behind the scam that ruined Eloise’s life. Josh Hutcherson plays the culprit, and he puts his head of security, Wallace Westwyld (Jeremy Irons), an ex-director of the CIA, on the case to stop Clay.
It is not much of a spoiler to say that Clay is pretty much unstoppable. Westwyld even tells a group of elite soldiers employed by the CIA that they are wimps compared to Clay (he uses a far more colorful metaphor, of course). The film’s suspense comes from not if Clay gets his revenge but when and especially how. Clay is brutal throughout the film, using various weapons and schemes to violently terminate many bad guys. The highlights include Clay using a truck for execution in one scene and an elevator in another sequence. The surgical knife fighting style Statham displays in the Expendables films is also a part of his character in The Beekeeper. Several villains in the film, particularly Hutcherson’s character and his fellow scammers, are so arrogant, greedy, dismissive of Clay, and genuinely unlikable that you will enjoy seeing Clay wreck them. On the heroes’ side, Verona Parker and her partner Matt Riley provide some comedy to the film, as Clay is too much in revenge mode to deliver anything other than dry wit. The cast, on the whole, is serviceable, and nearly everyone in the film shows more range than Statham. At this point, Jason Statham has become Steven Seagal, though cooler. He is the invincible hero who never misses a step, never loses a fight, and shrugs off wounds as minor setups. Whether it is the mob, an army of mercenaries, fellow martial artists, or a megalodon shark, he gets the W. If you are a fan of Statham and love watching him dispatch despicable people in gloriously gory ways, you may enjoy The Beekeeper. If you want something deeper, look elsewhere.
