Picture one of the shady brokers shown in “The Wolf of Wall Street” financially destroying the mother of Jason Bourne. More or less, that’s the premise of “The Beekeeper,” which features Jason Statham as a haphazard ex special forces soldier who incites an Old Testament-style wrath upon the modern day thieves who sack people on the internet using sophisticated technologies.
Statham is disguised as Adam Clay, an MMA variant of Clint Eastwood in The Man with No Name. Nothing is known about Adam save that he stays in the countryside producing and marketing honey, or rather that clay is infact a statham and such a statham is more than a mere honey producer. He is best looked after by an older woman Eloise Parker (Phylicia Rashad) who owns a farm close to his and lends him part of her barn for storage. To him diffrently, Eloise is the only one who has hitherto bothered about him. Scraping Ad’s accounts bare, Eloise’s congenitally foolish response to an online scam is a phishing scam involving a data technical company advertising for a nonprofit she had helped establish which leads to allsorts of gore y. Adam wears a beekeeping costume to blend in with his disguise as he is now a soldier of fortune fighting to end a very well entrenched system.
Inferring the way Eloise ended up taking care of Adam is nearly impossible, much more difficult is understanding what she means to him when he states her like that. The strong point of the film is that it doesn’t explain this either, nor does it explain who Adam was before he turned out into a super secret special operative. No fingerprints, no knowledge within any official governmental organization, and he sounds (according to other characters) like a sort of self-appointed overseer of society.
David Ayer, the director of ‘Suicide Squad’ and ‘Fury’ and veteran action and thriller writer recently had a collaboration with Wimmer, who of course is known for quite a few hits such as Point Break or Total Recall. The leading man does seem to have earned his muscles the hard way and the film gives due respect to the action star, and his works which include dialogue, martial arts or almost anything else are kept to the bare minimum.
Statham is a movie star like no other and with time, he has only gotten better. After leaving an impression on me in Ritchie’s ‘Wrath of Man,’ I was captivated by the fact that there, as in the current film, he was primarily a concept that had to engage the audience’s attention. Statham’s portrayal in The Beekeeper was profound due to its subtlety allowing for sentimentality in moments when he recalls Eloise’s impact and when he philosophizes over the beehive’s structure and the role of each worker in sustaining a society. I cannot think of many action heroes who would have the audacity to pronounce the words ‘I believe there’s good in the universe’ in a movie and make you buy not only the character’s conviction but the movie’s as well.
Do not be dull, this is interesting: Somehow, it is rather amusing, or even impressive, how spot on their casting is given the sheer amount of characters involved in the show. Some of the best include David Witts as Garnett, the head of the boiler room who personally defrauds Eloise and brags about it to hordes of junior vultures like a tom cruise type go-getter in the 80s; Josh Hutcherson as the Vice President of the data mining firm’s more than a bit spoiled, morally her wretched father, the president of the USA (Jemma Redgrave), uh, and coked up Derek Danforth; Jeremy Irons as Wallace Westwyld, who was older than Derek’s ex- CIA director, who seems that he descended from the cast of ‘veep’ and comes off as a jaded pessimist; and own Taylor James as the wank of a mercenary who boasts of having once snuffed the life out of Adam and is yearning to repeat history with him. I mean all of them are quite repugnant and or nauseating in some way or the other. Something’s not right here; that particular screen call him kyle looks like he’s spent the last 14 years steeped in oat milk. Out of respect for his ten-year career in television, Hutcherson’s characters are only ever heard speaking in the type of voice of an obnoxiously primed lower-middle-class teenager that endures puberty but never matures. When James’ character becomes enraged, and ceases to discuss how worthless Adam is, he speeks in a misty clouding of Saliva.
Irons has purposely been dressed and lit to enhance the ‘royal rotter’ look that made him so ideal in black comedies, psychosexual thrillers and horror flicks during the 90s Era.
It’s very disappointing that “The Beekeeper” happens to be a movie that is not the righteous trash epic it appears to be. Somewhere in here is a terrific pop song — one that probably concentrated on Adam and the horrible people he is trying to kill. But the film is messy and irritatingly superficial at times. So now there is an interesting character who is Eloise’s daughter, an FBI agent, Verona Parker (Emmy Raver-Lampman) and an extra aspect that does not even need to have been added; she has a husband, Matt Wiley (Bobby Naderi), who would reel Adam in and lock him up despite the fact that Vienna’s first guess about his involvement should have been a correct one. As if she should see him as more of a Dr. Richard Kimble type Loses a wife and gets hunted down for the murder of his wife. Yes, the FBI couple is very cute together but undermines the silliness of buddy cop comedy riffs in their scenes, which is against the character of Verona should be made to feel, which is rage and fixation in respect to what happened to her mom and she should be as equally angry as Adam is.
As sad as it may be, the movie ends on a note that is politically and philosophically weak, which is quite a few movies revolving around vigilante action reactions do: leaving one with the impression that the problem is not a fundamental national or human character defect, but rather, a few bad individuals acting outside the constraints of their decent supervisors. This is how even the most socially critical genre Hollywood films tremble in the end and deliver banal message. It is not a genetically rooted, systemic and malicious cancer within the institutions, they say, but some deviant individuals, and once they are get purged all returns back to saintly order. Here was a chance to try something much more interesting but the movie did not go there. If any working actor has the ability to in substance and in vision Burn It All Down, and have the audience on their feet screaming, it is Statham.
At its finest, which is when Statham takes over the entire film proportionality cuttthroat shooting and sadistically wounding those who deserve it and making and huge fires, something murderous gentlemen expect to be occupied with, ‘The Beekeeper’ is a film that stands in line with the lot of ‘Billy Jack’ and the first ‘Walking Tall’. It is a dream about gruesomely torturing and murdering those murderous smooth criminals who shamelessly spite the rules of our civilized societies. How interesting it would be to watch ‘The Beekeeper’ and imagine all the possible scenarios where elderly relatives of people like the author have been defrauded via different schemes, such as inheriting circles, where law enforcement and court employees turned out to be completely passive in helping recipients of injustice. And how easy it would be for them if they simply got in their cars and checked their rearview mirrors, where Jason Statham would be huddled in the back seat.
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