Jason Statham has been a transporter, a mechanic, a killer elite, an expendable, and a spy (as well as a lock, stock, and smoking barrel), but he takes on his most buzzworthy role to date—get it?—with The Beekeeper (in theaters Jan. 12), a derivative B-movie that returns the star to the macho environs he thrives in best. A transparent John Wick knock-off from director David Ayer (Suicide Squad) and writer Kurt Wimmer (Sons of Anarchy) that delivers its vigilante violence with a self-seriousness that’s at odds with its absurdity, it’s a beat-’em-up whose competent fight sequences are ultimately overshadowed by its unintentional humor.
After carefully bagging up a hornet’s nest, Adam Clay (Statham) is dubbed “a blessing” by his elderly neighbor Eloise (Phylicia Rashad) for bringing light back into her home and life. Clay is a grim badass of few words who cares about Eloise, so he’s none too pleased when he revisits her house that evening to gift her some fresh honey collected from his beehives and discovers that she’s killed herself. Eloise’s FBI agent daughter Verona (Emmy Raver-Lampman) catches Clay at the scene and suspects that he’s a murderer, but additional sleuthing clues them into what the film has already shown us. Namely: that Eloise was the victim of a canny phishing scam orchestrated by Garnett (David Witts), a weasel who lords over his giant high-tech control room—full of neon lights, panoramic digital screens, and banks of computers and phones manned by heartless minions—like a Vegas nightclub MC.
The Beekeeper imagines data-mining scams as glitzy ventures run by callous white-collar cretins, and while that doesn’t come across as very realistic, it’s no more outlandish than the rest of the proceedings. Once Clay’s name is cleared and he learns about the phishing con, he gets down to grim business, showing up at Garnett’s base of operations with two gas tanks in hand, announcing to anyone he meets that he plans to burn the place to the ground. Clay admirably proves himself a man of his word, although by that point, it’s already apparent that he means what he says, given that most of what comes out of his mouth are bee-related metaphors and statements of fact. “I take care of bees,” he growls early on. Later, he announces. “I’m a beekeeper. I protect the hive.” Veronica quickly grasps this fact, stating, “He’s protecting the hive, sir. It’s what beekeepers do.” This is, she understands, his mission: “to keep the hive safe.” His adversary also gets it, remarking—about the fact that Clay is called a beekeeper—“that’s like his whole brand or whatever.”
