‘THE BEEKEEPER’ Makes John Wick Look Like Walt Whitman

Just because a movie actively acknowledges how dumb it is doesn’t make it any less so. This is the case with The Beekeeper, a low-rent John Wick knockoff that almost plays like a spoof. There’s plenty of quick-cut bloody action, a truly mind-boggling amount of references to bees and bee hive politics, and some of the worst dialogue this side of an Expendables movie. Pretty much everyone involved in the project seems to be in on the joke, hamming up the lowbrow camp when not administering decent, if unmemorable, action shoot ‘em ups, but that doesn’t make its consumption any less grueling.

David Ayer is the man conducting the flash-bang silliness here, unable to break his recent streak of bad to worse movies. Ayer’s presence in the director’s chair once suggested promise but it’s been a long march to the bottom. From the highs of Training Day, End of Watch, and Fury to cinematic clunkers like Suicide Squad, The Tax Collector, Bright, and now this, this star has fallen down to earth and started digging. The counter-culture spark that defined his early career and rise to prominence is nowhere to be found these days, ceded to the most basic demands of the movie-goers in seats there to, by their own admission, turn off their brains.

And turn off your brain, you must. The Beekeeper is a simple enough proposition: a retired operative played by Jason Statham must come out of retirement when a security scam company with high-up connections ruins the life of his elderly neighbor. Blessed with one of the dumbest scripts I’ve ever encountered, courtesy of Kurt Wimmer, who wrote the critically-reviled remakes of both Point Break and Total Recall, The Beekeeper has a maybe-intentionally hilarious, maybe-not tendency of shouting the obvious bits out loud. We learn that Statham cares for his elderly neighbor because he tells her a scene earlier, “You’re the only person who’s ever cared for me.” Moment later he shares, “Elderly people and children are the most vulnerable people in society” in a deadpan that had my audience in stitches. It’s the kind of movie where characters state their motivations and traits out-loud to prevent the thickest-skulled in the audience from missing the plainly apparent. When Statham’s Adam Clay goes to burn down the building of those responsible for his neighbor’s undoing, he tells them, “I’m going to burn this building down.” As events escalate and Clay finds himself hunting down increasingly powerful individuals and entities, we learn about his association with a shadowy group of deep state specialists known as The Beekeepers. They exist to keep society in check, protect the hive, and watch out for the most vulnerable amongst us. Like, *checks notes*, the elderly. The amount of times that bees and bee society is referenced is truly startling. As is the fact that this Beekeeper (government operator) is also an actual beekeeper (man who keeps bees.)

All of the Beekeeper mythos is laugh-out-loud stupid; so over-the-top that it begins to feel like parody. Plenty of folks in my audience were laughing and hooting but it was unclear where they were laughing at or with the film. Regardless, they appeared to be having a good time. This critic? Less so.

Although The Beekeeper has its moments of absurdist action-thrills, campy hysteria, and a spell of good casting in Jeremy Irons as a shaken former CIA director and Josh Hutcherson as a rampaging nepo baby, both on Clay’s hit list, it’s all just so mind-numbingly stupid. The fact that the action itself isn’t all that impressive adds to the overall sense of malaise and cynicism driving this film. It’s not a good movie by anyone’s standards – and even it’s would-be staunchest defenders will acknowledge just how bird-brained the plot and dialogue is – and yet Ayer and company seem totally comfortable with that fact. The lack of effort is pretty standard for a Statham actioner but Ayer used to aspire to more. To say his career undoing is a disappointment wouldn’t be inappropriate. The action is not bad so much as it doesn’t really do anything memorable or remarkable at any given point; it’s a pale recreation of what John Wick is executing almost by reflex by this point. For his part, Statham balances his rock-’em-sock-’em physicality with a kind of dumb-guy brutish humor but it’s just another one-note shtick in a career built upon one-note shtick.

CONCLUSION: ‘The Beekeeper’ is so patently stupid that it starts to feel like a spoof of a John Wick movie. The script is as dopey as they come, even if the whole cast and crew seem to know that this B-movie isn’t aspiring to be anything more than a dumber-than-rocks knock-’em’-up.