The Beekeeper Parent Guide

After a career as a secret operative, Adam Clay (Jason Statham) has settled

down to a quiet life of beekeeping. He rents land from Eloise (Phylicia Rashad)
and the two have developed a small friendship. Then Eloise is defrauded by scammers
who infiltrated her computer and stole her money plus all the money from a children’s
charity she manages. Distraught, Eloise takes her own life.

Now Adam decides that he might need to come out of retirement and pick up
some of those old clandestine skills, but he’s got a tricky challenge to
navigate. Eloise’s daughter, Verona (Emmy Raver-Lampman) is an FBI agent, and
is also highly motivated to track down the cyber-slime who rip off the elderly.
The FBI don’t really work with outside contractors, least of all beekeepers –
but Adam isn’t planning on working with the Bureau, so much as around
them.

I was not surprised to learn that this film had the same writer as such
hits as The
Misfits and Expend4bles, although
we seem to have reached a new low in screenwriting. Half the time the characters
can’t even swear properly, which is especially embarrassing considering that the
film has better than 125 f-bombs. Large parts of the script feel like they were
written by a third-rate AI program which has been trained exclusively on failed
projects from high school creative writing classes. I’ve heard better dialogue
in children’s puppet shows.

Of course, lazy writing is hardly unusual for a Jason Statham action
flick, and this production is completely interchangeable with his other films.
They’re all the same punchy revenge thriller, and apparently the studio wasn’t
about to change the format this late in the game. The Beekeeper is
riddled with small continuity problems as well, undoubtedly because no one
could be bothered to look at the script more than once. The action is
reasonably creative, and the bad guys sufficiently odious, that you can put
your brain into neutral and let the film wash over you like a tepid bubble bath
of violence. That’s about the only way to watch this, because if you use any
more of your brain than that, you’ll have to get up and leave.

Leaving is what you’ll probably do if you disregard the R-rating and
wander in with kids only to encounter the litany of violence and profanity which
fuels the film. Unoriginal and bloated, the movie will probably be a hit with existing
Jason Statham fans, who seem to want more of the same. For the rest of us, this
is hardly worth the price of admission. After all, you can trawl through any number
of streaming services and find a film released years ago which is substantially
identical and save yourself the cost of a ticket.