'The Beekeeper' Isn't The Best Bad Kurt Wimmer Movie But It's Pretty Good

Do oy keep bees, Tommy? A course oy focken do.

Welcome to The #Content Report, a newsletter by Vince Mancini. I’ve been writing about movies, culture, and food since the aughts. Now I’m delivering it straight to you, with none of the autoplay videos, takeover ads, or chumboxes of the ad-ruined internet. Support my work and help me bring back the cool internet by subscribing, sharing, commenting, and keeping it real.

—

MGM

“Did you know there are some members of the hive called ‘queen slayers,’ whose job is to kill the queen if she produces the wrong kind of offspring?”

This is a line from The Beekeeper, a Jason Statham action movie written by Kurt Wimmer, the beau ideal of a 1980s screenwriter born at least a decade too late. In the age of IP-driven filmmaking and non-stop remakes (of which Wimmer himself has written a few, including the sublime Point Break remake from 2015), few things are more refreshing than the idea of a himbo screenwriter building an entire original action movie universe out of a random bee fact he probably encountered on a honey blog. Talk about a victory for the human spirit.

“Queen Slayers, eh?” You imagine Wimmer saying to himself, scratching his chin. “Statham could play that.”

Yes, Statham pays the proverbial Beekeeper in The Beekeeper, protecting the hive (society) by slaying the queen (President Danforth, played by Jemma Redgrave), because she produced “the wrong kind of offspring” (Josh Hutcherson). Hutcherson plays Derek Danforth, the First Failson and owner of a company that stole all of Phylicia Rashad’s money using CIA data mining software. Statham is Adam Clay, a mysterious recluse who lives in Phylicia Rashad’s barn making artisanal honey.

There’s an effortless poetry to the idea of a movie called “The Beekeeper” opening on the protagonist keeping bees, form and function expressed seamlessly. Manny Farber, the critic who coined the term “termite art” had to be fist pumping from the grave. It’s termite art about bees!

The opening frame of The Beekeeper sees Statham, as Clay, using smoke to relocate a colony of bee-eating hornets into what looks like a giant paper bag.

“What are you going to do with them now?” asks Phylicia Rashad, as Clay walks the grounds of the property carrying his big bag of hornets.

“Must oy reveaw aw da beekeepah’s secrets?” Statham asks with a smirk.

One of the next scenes sees Clay shocking the hornets to death with a stun gun attached to a fluorescent light bulb, presumably going way above and beyond normal hornet euthanasia methods. The implication is clear: this man will torture *insects* to death to protect the hive (society). So when some evil call center guys steal money from Phylicia Rashad (“the only person who ever took care of me,” Clay calls her) and bankrupt her children’s charity, you immediately start to extrapolate from the hornet torture.

Part of the fun of any Jason Statham is imagining how he’s going to kill an army of bad guys gruesomely and then watching him do it. He clearly has a particular set of skills, but what are they?

Part of the fun of any Kurt Wimmer movie is the lore, whether it’s Queen Slayers, the Ozaki Eight, or Gun Kata. The Beekeeper is like a B-movie hydra, an enjoyably uneasy mix of Statham’s persona, Wimmer’s lore, and director David Ayer’s Papa Roach-esque aesthetic (you may remember Ayer as the writer of Training Day, the director of the Suicide Squad before last, and the director of The Tax Collector, the role that inspired Shia LaBeouf to get a giant “CREEPER” tattoo across his stomach). The Beekeeper is an extended bee metaphor because of Kurt Wimmer; it’s about a reclusive badass because of Jason Statham; and Statham’s character looks like he just stepped off a loading dock because of David Ayer. Nothing wrong with that, though I could’ve done with more bee puns.

Statham’s first gruesome kill is the douchebag manager of the evil call center (an evil call center network, perfect action movie device), who were pumping each other up Boiler Room-style while they emptied Phylicia Rashad’s bank accounts. Statham first cuts the guy’s fingers off with a band saw, and then attaches him to the back of Statham’s pick-up truck with a load lock and then drives it off a pier, yanking the fingerless douche behind it and dragging him down into the briny deep. That’s pretty hard to beat, as B-movie vengeance killings go. They probably shouldn’t have led with that.

Meanwhile, Phylicia Rashad’s daughter, who turns out to be an FBI agent, is hot on Clay’s tail, even though she seems to hate his victims just as much as he does (they bankrupted her mom, after all). Emmy Raver-Lampman plays Agent Verona Parker, a Joss Whedony millennial smart aleck who seems like she escaped from a different movie. Though in her defense, most of the characters in The Beekeeper feel like they escaped from different movies.

“Nice shirt,” a furious Agent Parker says to one of the surviving evil call center guys. “Did you steal it from a corpse, you dog fucker?”

Raver-Lampman, a member of the original Hamilton cast who also stars in Netflix’s Umbrella Academy, keeps speeding through lines like these when she should really be savoring them. Dog fucker? That’s gold! Only in his dreams could Lin-Manuel Miranda write dialogue like that.

With Agent Parker and her partner hot on Clay’s tail (unclear what they will actually do when they catch him) Statham’s rampage takes him from evil call center to evil call center, all the way to the White House. As Josh Hutcherson’s empire crumbles around him, his attack dog, an ex-CIA man played by Jeremy Irons (is this character supposed to be British? I’m not sure even Irons knows), sends teams of badasses of increasing severity to try to stop this Beekeeper. The SWAT team, FBI commandos, Delta Force, Seal Team 6 — even Statham’s successor in the Beekeeper program. Oh right, the Beekeepers are an official government black ops program. They have no oversight and few know about them. Their task, in whatever form it takes, is to protect the hive (society). We learn most of this right along with Agent Parker, afforded the unenviable task of delivering all The Beekeeper’s exposition almost as if she’s reading off the film’s Wikipedia page.

The commandos, meanwhile, waffle wildly from extremely grounded (an FBI commando played by a normal-sized Asian guy) to extremely cartoonish, like the new Beekeeper, a Run Lola Run-style Euro punk with a choppy haircut, pit viper sunglasses and a reflective trench coat. The commandos function basically like video game bosses, though Statham never seems to have much trouble dispatching them. At one point, a commando team leader basically tells his men, “This guy’s a beekeeper, he’s definitely going to murder you.” And then the Beekeeper murders them!

The last of these commando bosses Statham has to kill is, interestingly, a caricature of a South African, wearing yellow fatigues and a peg leg played by Taylor James. IMDB says this character is named “Lazarus.” Lazarus spits a lot and calls everyone “BRU!” just to make sure you know he’s South African. It feels like either Kurt Wimmer or David Ayer just learned about South Africans.

It’s great fun watching Statham murder and maim call center douchebags while wearing a big labelless baseball cap and a flannel Carhart pullover. Yet if there’s a major flaw in the film, it’s that most of Statham’s maimings come in the form of these commandos. The commandos are basically collateral damage in this rampage, and their deaths far less cathartic as a result. Even President Danforth, a Betsy Devos-type character who apparently financed her own presidential campaign with her software riches, turns out to be largely blameless in the whole matter. She had no idea her evil son was stealing children’s charity money from widows to bankroll her political aspirations, and she’s devastated to find out. And Jeremy Irons? He’s only helping Peeta out of obligation (he and President Danforth used to bang).

This would be like if Jason Statham had played a Nazi killer, and by the end of the movie we found out that the Final Solution was really all Goebbels’ fault and everyone else in the Third Reich were just well-meaning rubes who wanted to listen to Wagner and go to parades. A murderous rampage is far less fun if there’s only one bad guy.

It almost makes me wonder whether The Beekeeper was just Kurt Wimmer and David Ayer’s twisted, funhouse mirror take on My Son Hunter, the Daily Wire-produced takedown of Hunter Biden starring Robert Davi and Gina Carano. Everything bad in it really does come down to Evil Pita Malarkey, the President’s coke-snorting, data mining, vape-addicted fail son. The Queen had the wrong kind of offspring, you see. The Queen Slayer had to protect the hive. That’s really all there is to it.

The concentration of blame onto just one guy is fairly anti-climactic. And yet, just when you’re feeling disappointed about the way things turned out, Jason Statham literally SCUBAs off into the sunset while Agent Verona Parker bids him happy trails from the beach, Johnny Utah-style. Surely he will return, the next time someone’s defective offspring threatens the hive (society).

As always, there are worse ways to spend 90 minutes than watching a ridiculous Kurt Wimmer movie.