Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Beekeeper’ on Prime Video, a Hilarious Jason Statham Bloodbath That’s Sweet as Honey

Last year’s January gem – definition: a trashy B-movie dumped during the winter blahs that’s far more entertaining than it probably should be – was M3gan, and this year it’s The Beekeeper (now streaming on Amazon Prime Video), a ludicrous action movie that finds Jason Statham in full so-humorless-it’s-funny mode, which is easily his best mode, and better than whatever he was doing in those dopey-ass The Meg movies. Beekeeper is directed by David Ayer, who made a splash writing Training Day and directing End of Watch before he bottomed out critically with an ill-fated DC foray (2016’s Suicide Squad), a godawful Will Smith sci-fried Netflick (Bright) and a Movie I Didn’t Know Existed (anybody see The Tax Collector?). So this is a return to form for a solid action director who knows where to keep his tongue with stuff like this: in his cheek.

THE BEEKEEPER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: “No one’s ever taken care of me before.” Such is the sad lament of Adam Clay (Statham), if that is indeed his real name, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. See, he’s just a humble beekeeper! Wears the net over his face and the jumpsuit and everything. We meet him as he removes a hornet’s nest from his honeybee sanctuary. Hornets hunt and kill honeybees, see. And the only thing you can do with a hornet’s nest is put it in a bag and insert a long fluorescent light bulb and touch a taser on the end of it and ZAP ’EM. Is this a moment of foreshadowing where we wonder if he’s going to do that to a person later in the movie, or at least an illustration of his capability of coldly and clinically killing living things? I’m not gonna say. But let’s just say if Jason Statham plays a longfaced loner who’s “just a humble beekeeper,” chances are, he’s taken human lives before.

He at least has one friend, and that’s Eloise (Phylicia Rashad), who rents him the ol’ barn out back so Adam can tend the bees and make honey and sleep, assuming he’s not a robot in human skin who doesn’t sleep, and he just might be. She asks him about the hornet’s nest and he explains what happens when you kick a hornet’s nest and wouldn’t you know it, she falls for a phishing scam and not only loses all her money, but the $2 million she manages for a charity that probably benefits sick babies and ocelot kittens with lupus. We jump between her and a call center that makes The Wolf of Wall Street look like Sesame Street, and it’s full of scammers who laugh whenever they snake some poor senior citizen’s life savings from under their digital mattress. The restroom-tile-licker overseeing this operation is Derek Danforth (Josh Hutcherson), a rich-kid tech-bro sleazoid, and we instantly want him to be vaporized by a death ray from Alpha Centauri, because it’s the only way to be sure.

But that doesn’t happen, because we’re working with a hornet’s-nest metaphor here, and consider it kicked. Now, having recently purchased a small amount of bottom-shelf grocery-store honey, and knowing how much it cost me, and therefore deducing how much a guy like Adam could charge per jar of his organic shit, you might think it’d take about two weeks for him to recoup the couple million stolen from Eloise, but let’s not poke holes in the plot. Besides, Adam doesn’t give off reasonable-guy vibes, and our suspicions are confirmed when he walks into the aforementioned call center and single-handedly beats the bone marrow out of anyone in his path and douses the place with gasoline and blows it to smithereens. You may chant it with me: It seems they’ve just effed with the wrong beekeeper. Now drink!

The ensuing incredibly violent drama that unfolds takes place in a Small World where Eloise’s daughter Verona (Emmy Raver-Lampman) happens to be an FBI agent who can dig into Adam’s file to learn that he used to be some sort of mysterious mega-secret special-ops guy – he’s so very OPS, isn’t he, just OPS and OPS oozing from his pores – and the Hutcherson brat happens to be the son of billionaires who employ the former CIA director (Jeremy Irons exclamation point!) to run a megacorp that’s so huge nobody really notices that Hutcherbrat is is a scam artist. I’m telling you, if these characters weren’t ultra-ass connected, the plot might not work at all, and it might also not become a ludicrous cartoon that could teach us a lesson about the dangers of retaliation and escalation if we weren’t laughing our tuckuses off at all the highly entertaining violence that ensues. 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Beekeeper is like The Mechanic meets Nobody meets John Wick meets Honeyland meets Die Hard meets the Rambo movie where he lives on middle-of-nowhere acreage so he can dig an intricate maze of tunnels beneath it – with a juicy Godzilla reference thrown in for good measure.

Performance Worth Watching: Statham pulls a real serious puckerface here, like dead-as-the-Dallas-Cowboys serious. There was a time when I had grown weary of Statham’s mean mug, but in retrospect that was a sad time, and I have since – post-Spy, I believe – learned to appreciate it for its sly, understated winking irony. 

Memorable Dialogue: Adam disguises a threat as a sales-pitch robocall:

Adam: You sound young. I bet you don’t have estate planning.

Hutcherbrat: I’m f—ing 28 years old. Why would I need that?

Adam: I’m about to show you.

Sex and Skin: None. 

Our Take: The Beekeeper is one of those of course movies. As in, of course he says he’s retired, and of course he’s a veteran of all the OPS, and of course he can murder an entire SWAT team with his bare hands, and of course this plot goes all the way to the Eff Bee Eye – and then even further, just to make it extra farcical. Uh huh, I kept saying as the plot progressed, uh huh, in between cackles. The plot thicks and thicks not like your mom stands at the stove stirring and stirring and stirring and stirring the gravy and adding starch as needed, but in a big plop as the store-bought gravy slides out of the jar; the movie doesn’t taste like the high-level craftsmanship of John Wick, but it sure as hell gets the job done. I don’t know if that metaphor works, but I’m not sure this movie entirely works, but it doesn’t care that it doesn’t work, and I don’t care that it doesn’t care, and in fact, it may be more entertaining because it doesn’t care.

Ayers threads the needle and finds the sweet spot (yes, another rickety-ass metaphor, sue me) between satire and old-school this-is-where-the-law-stops-and-I-start ’80s-action junk, complete with gratuitous gore and quippity-quip one-liners. It’s modern in the sense that crooks who used to deal guns and drugs are replaced with data thieves, one of whom quite humorously tries to pay off our “hero” with NFTs. Nice try, doucheypants! That guy ends up dying a very hilarious death, and there’s no subtext to it, just an amoral vigilante on a righteous revenge crusade extinguishing a greasy little turd who deserves it. That kind of stuff is satisfying on a dumbass base level, and that’s why I can’t help but recommend The Beekeeper, not at all against my better judgment. 

Our Call: This movie made me feel like I was escaping things for 100 or so minutes. It felt nice. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.