The Beekeeper

In an age of streaming services and diversification of content platforms, old-fashioned distinctions like 'B movies' or 'straight to video' matter less from an economic perspective. They're still pretty handy as an indicator of quality though, and this might be one of the few ways that The Beekeeper doesn't disappoint.

Jason Statham's mid-market action history includes films involving Luc Besson, John Carpenter and Uwe Boll. That's the ones by auteurs whose output, while sometimes sparkling, is most likely to see 'ouevre' as something used to collect dust. He's enough of a draw to offer support to action-movie retirement package franchise The Expendables and the naked physics of filmmaking are diagramatically applied in works like Crank and The Mechanic.

If you enjoyed any of these, then The Beekeeper will probably suffice. If that seems like faint praise then understand that it's intentional. David Ayer wrote Training Day and that was a film rooted in some tremendous performances and Antoine Fuqua's direction. Ayer's own directorial efforts have been a somewhat mixed bag, Harsh Times and End Of Watch both had something to say in their flashy violence but Fury came closer to signifying nothing and Suicide Squad seemed to establish that Ayer could convince with a couple but a crew diluted things too far.

It seems that a single protagonist might not be enough for him either, but I won't honey words too much in saying that if Ayer's got a sweet spot for film-making this isn't it. Statham's usually a convincing action protagonist but there's something about the choppiness of its cuts that makes it all seem a bit nonsensical. Decisions in production design (especially the scam call centres that start proceedings) seem intent on allowing a sort of neon murk that would suggest dim recollection of the Tech Noir of The Terminator even without one of them featuring a high-end collectible of the endoskeleton crushing a skull. That kind of lurid palette can work really well. It's one of several things that reminded me of Renfield in this, but frequently it seems like design decisions and filters have been applied not to say anything but to replicate something else.

I say that the action makes things seem nonsensical, but to be clear the words are well in front. Those words are by Kurt Wimmer, who appears to have taken large chunks of the 'idea' of Law Abiding Citizen and reframed it to reflect the ever changing zeitgeist of the empty-headed vaguely right-wing revenge fantasy. The beekeeping thing, see, is an expository metaphor, and I know this because at one point a character describes society as "not unlike a beehive." Someone also says that "taking from an elderly person is as bad as stealing from a child," which is a line delivered with all the passion and intensity of a request for a cleanup on aisle 6. While Law Abiding Citizen was basically a Death Wish remade to borrow from Saw, The Beekeeper takes that frame and squeezes it into the vein of a Nobody or a John Wick.

There's a mention of Goodfellas and the high energy rip-off merchants owe a debt (possibly literally) to The Wolf Of Wall Street. There are two broad classes of American crime film. Those from the left treat it as a differently failing form of capitalism, those from the right treat it as 'the system' protecting those it shouldn't. The Beekeeper is so massively of the latter that even if it didn't actually have someone say they had to choose between "the law or justice" there might have been clues in its very thinly veiled analogues to Hunter Biden and Hillary Clinton.

That's notionally one of the surprises, by the way, that crime and politics are often close-coupled. Jeremy Irons turns up as a former CIA director and for a moment like an idiot I thought there might have been something in the parallels between espionage and organised crime and their systems of silence and the whole business of being undercover and what James Jesus Angleton called 'The Wilderness Of Mirrors'. We do get a corridor lined with them, but beyond cruelly retaining a blowout that would make any cinematographer wince, the intent is not to have parallels with Versailles and the French Revolution or the injustices of Armistice, but to have Jason Statham really stab up a guy and maybe steal his leg.

That guy is a South African mercenary played by Taylor James who appears to have been drawn from memory from Schwarzenegger's Commando. As the rampaging Beekeeper is tracked by the FBI with dialogue that includes the actual line "like a beekeeper beekeeper?" which should probably actually be "like a Beekeeper Beekeeper?" the hardest thing to keep track of is which other, better, movies you are being reminded of. Megan Le turns up after a sequence that might be meant to recall the Suicide Girls Telephone Exchange aesthetic of John Wick's weird Rockabilly underworld but resembles instead a corporate training video. Her character's primary purpose is to leave a clue behind after a painful text message exchange and an explosion that recalls Robocop. Oh and to have part of her body stolen too, which could have been a recurring theme if the entomological metaphors had been extended beyond borders so clumsy one wonders if they're hexagonal by accident.

Minnie Driver turns up for a bit, Josh Hutcherson is a sort of slightly bigger bad. Because this was filmed in part in the UK a bunch of folk who've been in Eastenders turn up with somewhat American accents. That's foregrounded in a conversation between Statham and Emmy Raver-Lampman who "detects a bit of British Isles" in taciturn mumblings. She's an FBI agent, and among the film's many, many liberties with what seems like operational sensibility or questions of jurisprudence, her investigation is almost a through line. That's not because it requires one of those red-stringed webs to track but because it plods doggedly from A to B. There's a credited law enforcement consultant, and I will spare their blushes because I actually suspect that there's a more credible depiction of tactics and techniques in the Paw Patrol movies.

You'll find yourself asking "why are they using a knife?" and I don't just mean within the film. Their repeated incongruous presence in the hands of people who should know better doesn't even give satisfying fight sequences. There's an actual plot hole in a hole not being covered up, and I'm astonished that in all the movies it would seem Kurt Wimmer half remembers, none of them have featured even the most basic precepts of bodyguarding or VIP protection. What's worst about all of this is that it's not even very bad. I'm no fan of "so bad it's good" but Blackbird was so staggering in its tone that it looped round and became a piece of outsider art like The Room. Complaints about "right and wrong... not [being] fashionable" are definitely older than me, and I strongly suspect that someone was angrily putting stylus to wax about the unjust protections of The Code of Hammurabi.

It's that which suggests the final evolution of these. When it comes to professional revenge we've got The Bricklayer coming soon and we've had The Accountant and The Card Counter and a Taxi Driver and The Machinist and even one and its remake that might as well have been called 'Mr Plow' or 'Plow King'. Eventually someone's going to be sitting in one of these meetings and they'll have Facebook open and they'll say "Remember proper bin-men?" and then we'll have a tag-line like "It's time to take out the trash" and the trailer will feature a moody chanteuse singing Lonnie Donegan's My Old Man's A Dustman. Even if it were twice as good as this I'd probably suggest you skip it.