By Nicholas Kobe, Staff Writer 

[Mirrimax; 2024]

Rating: 1/10

January has a reputation for being the dumping ground of Hollywood, and I don’t think there’s a more apt way 2024 could prove that than with The Beekeeper. David Ayer, best known as the director of Suicide Squad (2016), pulls together a heavy hitter cast for one of the most generic and mind-numbing action movies I’ve ever seen. 

Jason Statham stars as Adam Clay, aka “The Beekeeper,” who embarks on a revenge quest after a group of internet scammers led by Derek Danforth (Josh Hutcherson) trick old people into giving away their money. The daughter of the woman Adam is seeking to avenge is an FBI agent Verona Parker (Emmy Raver-Lampman), who is also leading her team to track down the cyber scammers. 

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The first, and most glaring, flaw of the movie is in the writing. Statham’s character is a one-man killing machine. While this is a common trait for action movie heroes like John Wick (John Wick) or John McClane (Die Hard), Adam Clay has the charisma of a wooden board. We are intentionally left in the dark about pretty much everything about Adam, and we barely have a single conversation to establish his connection to the scamming victim he proceeds to slaughter dozens for. This leads him to be a hero who we don’t care to root for aside from “the people he kills are bad.”

Luckily, the movie never fails to remind us of this, as Adam expresses to every villain in this film about how preying on digitally illiterate old folks is bad, which is painfully obvious. The problem is, considering how concerned about justice he is, he kills a lot of innocent people. In his quest for “revenge,” he slaughters countless Secret Service, FBI, and SWAT team members who are simply trying to handle the situation like actual professionals. The movie attempts to deal with this by having Jeremy Irons explain that the entire organization of “The Beekeepers” is a secret society of badasses who don’t have to obey proper criminal procedure because they are just that cool. 

While later events in the film prove why Adam’s mission is now going against “The Beekeeper” agenda, he still just kills, in gruesome fashion, “for the greater good” left and right. Action movies are filled with tension because you believe in the mission of the hero and they’re charming and fun to be around. The Beekeeper does the exact opposite. 

On top of my idealistic conflicts with the hero, let’s just talk about the name. Beekeepers? Really? Every character in this film treats this name with the same weight as Voldemort in Harry Potter. Statham spends half this movie without a shred of irony, talking about “protecting the hive” and other such things. Every bee-related line is side-splittingly funny. It’s genuinely hilarious how seriously this movie takes itself. 

This also extends to the villains, who feel like what older Gen Xers and Boomers think internet scammers are like. The call centers are decked out in tons of neon lights and the bosses are cowardly, influencer-like crypto-bros. It even goes so far as to include a scene where a man begs for his life to Adam with NFTs, and another where a man wears a suit jacket that says “GOAT” all over it. 

Sure, these scammers are bad dudes, but when they’re constantly being talked at by “holier than thou” Adam, I felt like the movie was one step away from launching into the type of “kids these days” rant your grandfather goes on when he sees you on social media. The scam run by the villains of this movie is so cartoonishly basic that I struggle to believe even the most digitally illiterate people would fall for it. The movie’s social media and tech focus is truly that surface level. The film’s third act leans into how the scam money went to funding a presidential campaign. It also gives this already machismo and “technology bad” revenge tale a half-baked MAGA-like political edge.

At an hour and 45 minutes, The Beekeeper flies fast between action set pieces that rush through an already incomprehensible and stupid plot. I’d take bigger offense to this if every single line of dialogue is either painfully dry or hilariously stupid. Every exchange in this movie is that bad. Unfortunately, The Beekeeper’s action really isn’t much better. The cinematography in these scenes is so choppy that it’s hard to follow what’s going on. When you manage to keep up, you get extremely cookie-cutter fight sequences that are occasionally broken up by absurd “what the hell” moments of either impracticality or brutality. 

While some fights are enjoyable if you turn your brain off, they fail to captivate the way the million-and-a-half other films in this genre do. The Beekeeper lives up to the action movie genre in terms of quantity. In terms of quality, however, it continues to fall short. 

The Beekeeper is a hilariously bad film. Serious nearly to the point of parody, this self-righteous film is a sloppy revenge fantasy designed for people with punisher stickers on their safe of assault rifles they’ll never actually use. It’s an absolute disaster from start to finish, with many moments that prove it’s so awful it’s funny.