The Beekeeper (2024)

Review: written Jan 2024

Swarm of bad guys

In equal parts brutal, amusing and ludicrous, there is no doubt ‘The Stath’s’ latest is entertaining. For the plot, you could ask AI to create an average of the last decades profitable actioners, and you’d likely end up with something not far off this.

Statham is a beekeeper, who in his retirement, looks after his bees in the barn of a sympathetic older lady. As soon as he takes the time to tell her how touched he is that she is the first person to really look after him, we guess she is likely going to come to a sticky end. Moments later, she falls prey to a bunch of highly organised scam artists – The Stath is enraged. Quietly, of course... we can tell because he clenches his jaw a bit harder.

The daughter of the kindly old lady is handily an FBI agent and provides a few clues to follow, and so The Stath decides to take matters into his own hands, revealing his former life – as part of an elite government program of killers, known as Beekeepers. Their role is never truly defined, but we get the idea from the hushed and reverential tones people use when their legendary killing abilities are discussed. As his brutal quest (think Death Wish meets The Equalizer) proceeds, it becomes clearer that finding the top of the chain of ne’er-do-wells will involve multiple showdowns, bullets, fist fights, pyrotechnics, knife fights and imaginative deaths as the conspiracy uncovered goes significantly beyond a mere scamming call centre.

Jeremy Irons picks up a cheque along the way, in a shoehorned role as an ex CIA boss now working as security advisor to one of the aforementioned ne-er-do-wells. Minnie Driver has a blink and you’ll miss it role, and even those females that manage to get more screen time than her are still underwritten and underused.

Things are amped up slightly too high at times – the invulnerability of the lead is unbelievable, the heights of the particular food chain our protagonist works his way up stretch credibility, and the characters are heightened video game caricatures rather than real people. So if you ask me what the movie is like – I can only say – “It’s a Jason Statham movie”. You kind of know what you’re going to get, and this outing has few surprises. But despite the insertion of a rather daft one-legged South African henchman for the obligatory mano a mano showdown, and the plot and action taking ever more far-fetched leaps, it all remains fairly rollicking fun. For a movie with this much death, it has a remarkable dose of joie de vivre.

Final thought – would a director’s version be ‘The Buzz Cut’..?