Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: David Ayer
Starring: Jason Statham, Jeremy Irons, Emmy Raver-Lampman, Josh Hutcherson, Bobby Naderi, Minnie Driver,
Phylicia Rashad
The revenge thriller is a broad tent. Some revenge thrillers feature an
everyday woman battling a handful of pudgy rednecks while others see
former special forces agents fighting against small armies. I've always
found the former more enjoyable in the same way that I find
Alien
more effective than Aliens – a regular woman fighting a
single monster is a lot more involving than a bunch of gun-toting
jarheads battling dozens of creatures. I guess it's a relatability
issue, much like how seeing a character step on a piece of LEGO will
cause you to wince more than if they were decapitated; I'm far more
likely to find myself in trouble with a bunch of rednecks than a private
army.
Director David Ayer began his career with a series of relatively
grounded action thrillers (Harsh Times; Sabotage) but in recent years has moved into overblown superhero and sci-fi
movies (Suicide Squad;
Bright). His latest, The Beekeeper, begins in relatively low key revenge movie territory but it becomes
increasingly over the top as the narrative progresses. As a result, it
becomes a lot less engaging, though there is fun to be had in its
trashiness.
Jason Statham is Adam Clay. He's a beekeeper. That has a double
meaning. He's literally a beekeeper, as in he keeps bees. But he's also
a former member of a secret special forces group known as The
Beekeepers. He's put all that behind him though. Now he just wants to
keep his bees.
Like Patrick Swayze in Road House, Adam rents a barn from a kindly elderly neighbour, Eloise (Phylicia Rashad), whose apiary he manages. When Eloise has her accounts emptied after
falling for a phishing scam, she commits suicide. As Eloise was the only
person who ever treated him with kindness, Adam vows revenge and deploys
his special set of skills to do so.
It's a genius move to make online scammers the villains of a revenge
movie. It's that relatability thing again. Who among us hasn't been
bugged by scam calls? I sometimes receive as many as five in a single
day, but I'm savvy enough to know to hang up immediately. We've all
heard the real life horror stories of elderly people being preyed upon
by these vultures.
It's immensely satisfying then to watch Adam wreak havoc in a boiler
room call centre. The trouble is this scene comes at the end of the
first act rather than at the end of the movie as the phishing scam is
simply part of a wider conspiracy that extends to the corridors of
power. It's at this point that any relatability goes out the window as
Ayer's film morphs from the sort of movie Roger Corman might have
produced in the '70s into a
John Wick
knock-off complete with a subterranean world of cartoonish contract
killers.
There is fun to be had however with how ridiculous things get from this
point. Josh Hutcherson is a delight as Derek Danforth, a
billionaire tech-bro who flies around his offices on a skateboard, which
automatically makes any sane viewer wish for him to die a grisly death.
Hutcherson seems to be channelling the great character actor David
Patrick Kelly, who specialised in playing snivelling little shits in
'80s action classics like Commando and 48 Hrs. Jeremy Irons hams it up as Derek's head of security.
Taylor James chews the scenery like it was beef jerky as a South
African mercenary with an artificial leg (yes, this is a movie that
literally treats us to the sight of a one-legged man in an ass-kicking
contest).
The script by Kurt Wimmer (responsible for such atrocities as
the Total Recall and Point Break remakes) is
inept in terms of storytelling. At one point a character's job is
revealed through having one character explain to another a detail that
every single person on the planet would be familiar with. There are some
lines that are so cringey you have to begrudgingly applaud them, like
when one character reworks a famous Shakespeare quote into an apiary pun
(yes, that one).
What's most disappointing is the treatment of Statham's character. The
action star has rarely been more monosyllabic, and his character is
devoid of personality. His job as beekeeper sadly never figures into the
plot. If you're expecting the action equivalent of Tony Todd's Candyman,
with Statham unleashing bees against his foes, you'll be stung by the
movie's failure to deliver on this potential. More b-action than bee
action then.
The Beekeeper is in cinemas
from January 12th.
