The Bee­keep­er review – not enough bees

A few min­utes into David Ayer’s The Bee­keep­er, there’s a charm­ing exchange between gruff retired secret agent Adam Clay (Jason Statham) and his land­la­dy, sweet old lady Eloise Park­er (Phyli­cia Rashad). After tak­ing care of a hor­net prob­lem on her prop­er­ty, Clay earnest­ly mum­bles, in his 75% British, 25% Amer­i­can accent, ​“I just want to thank you for putting up with me…and all my bees.” This exchange gave me the false hope that Ayer’s action-revenge yarn would focus quite heav­i­ly on lit­er­al bees – per­haps Clay, a bee­keep­er, can har­ness their pow­er against his ene­mies – but unfor­tu­nate­ly, most of the api­an con­tent in The Bee­keep­er is pure­ly sym­bol­ic. What a missed opportunity.

It turns out that Clay, now a lit­er­al bee­keep­er, used to be a fig­u­ra­tive Bee­keep­er – an elite, clas­si­fied agent hired to ​“pro­tect the hive” (the Unit­ed States) from any threats, by any means nec­es­sary. He’s long since retired but liked the con­cept of bee­keep­ing so much he chose to pur­sue it as a voca­tion, and has been liv­ing in an out­build­ing on Eloise Parker’s rur­al Mass­a­chu­setts prop­er­ty for some time. After Eloise is the vic­tim of a cal­lous tech scam that wipes out her bank accounts, Clay swears revenge, putting him on a direct col­li­sion course with brat­ty mil­len­ni­al nepo baby Derek Dan­forth (Josh Hutch­er­son) and his long-suf­fer­ing min­der, ex-head of the CIA Wal­lace West­wyld (Jere­my Irons).

There isn’t much else to say about The Bee­keep­er – if you’ve seen any of David Ayer’s films or screen­writer Kurt Wimmer’s (Expend4bles, Salt, Law Abid­ing Cit­i­zen) oth­er work, you’ll antic­i­pate the vio­lent set­pieces and ham-fist­ed dia­logue. While the insid­i­ous scam phone call net­work plot pot is a time­ly ene­my, it being pre­sent­ed as a millennial/​Gen Z inven­tion smacks of techno­pho­bic revi­sion­ism. The oblig­a­tory carousel of gener­ic bad­dies thun­der onto the screen one after the oth­er to be swift­ly dis­patched by Statham, who keeps mak­ing gruff state­ments about ​“pro­tect­ing the hive”, and it all seems to be lead­ing to a blow-out bat­tle that…never actu­al­ly hap­pens. After dis­patch­ing count­less goons with guns, gaso­line and one cre­ative use of a truck, a bridge and a length of belt, the film’s big show­down is a letdown.

But the thing I keep com­ing back to is the bees. If you’re going to call a film The Bee­keep­er and cen­tre it on a char­ac­ter who is both a lit­er­al bee­keep­er and a super spy with the code­name bee­keep­er, the least you can do is incor­po­rate bees or bee-relat­ed para­pher­na­lia into the plot as more than a metaphor. Have your hon­ey-lov­ing hero knock a bee­hive onto someone’s head Looney Tunes-style, or use a smok­er to flush out some goons from a build­ing. Show him drown­ing some­one in a vat of hon­ey, or incor­po­rat­ing bee ven­om into his armoury. Have Clay make some off­hand remark about how the decline of the hon­ey­bee is a sign of sure-fire envi­ron­men­tal col­lapse. If you real­ly want to go hell for leather, there’s the ancient prac­tice of scaphism, which I learned about from Hor­ri­ble His­to­ries as a child and was men­tal­ly scarred by. All we get, after the ini­tial bee-heavy intro­duc­tion, is a scene where the bad guys shoot up Clay’s beloved api­ary in retal­i­a­tion for him burn­ing down a call cen­tre, which is a major cop-out.

The Bee­keep­er real­ly could have been a film that sets itself apart from oth­er action thrillers by giv­ing us a hard­man with a sol­id brand and an impres­sive lev­el of job sat­is­fac­tion. Instead, what we have is a gener­ic addi­tion to an already over­sat­u­rat­ed genre – one that doesn’t even have the sense to make use of Statham’s often under­utilised comedic talents.