Cultivating bees may be regarded as a rather peaceful and meditative pursuit. But that doesn’t stop the title character of the preposterous action flick “The Beekeeper” (Amazon MGM) from going berserk when provoked.
Jason Statham plays the honey harvester in question, who goes by the name Adam Clay. Since, however, Adam is-what else?-an ex-elite operative with mad combat skills and a past he’s trying to escape, it’s a safe bet from the start that we’re dealing with an alias.
That makes him a man of mystery as well as the strong silent type. Who’d have guessed? Just about the only person for whom Adam unbuttons his lip, on occasion, is elderly widow Eloise Parker (Phylicia Rashad), the lady from whom he rents the space needed to pursue his avocation. In fact, Eloise is the closest thing to a friend Adam has.
So when computer illiterate Eloise falls victim to online scammers who succeed in emptying not only all her personal accounts but the funds of a charity on whose board she serves, and she commits suicide in despair as a result, Adam is outraged. He’s also sufficiently enraged to embark on a mayhem-littered quest for revenge.
Adam proceeds to mow down anyone who stands between him and those responsible for the crime. The latter include a duo of minions, callous slickster Mickey “Boyd” Garnett (David Witts) and loopy moron Rico Anzalone (Enzo Cilenti), as well as the big boss, spoiled rich boy Derek Danforth (Josh Hutcherson).
But Adam doesn’t confine himself to targeting the security guards and mercenaries these villains employ, in ever increasing numbers, to protect them. He also fells legions of police and whole Army units. Thus Eloise’s daughter, Verona (Emmy Raver-Lampman), who just happens to be an FBI agent, finds her loyalties divided as she tracks the unstoppable killer.
As scripted by Kurt Wimmer and directed by David Ayer, Adam’s ludicrous rampage shows such utter contempt for reality that it could be taken as an over-the-top joke. But there are moments in the dialogue straight-facedly upholding Adam’s crusade and falsely pitting obedience to the law against ultimate justice.
Consequently, serious assessment of the silly story’s blatant immorality is required. But that needn’t be laboured and can, perhaps, best be summarised by a bit of helpful advice: Viewers should simply shoo this absurd apis away lest they be stung by it.
Jason Statham called the film ‘great’ and said he is ‘really, really proud of the movie.”
“The whole movie escalates in terms of the action,” he told Variety magazine. “And it goes through an incredible, great crescendo. The whole world [of the film] has a mythology of the ‘beekeeping’ world. If we were fortunate enough to make a sequel, we have a whole world that we can dive into.”
Far from his tough guy image, Statham had to learn apiary in order to be a credible beekeeper in the film. The film’s director, David Ayer, told Entertainment Weekly how Statham ‘embraced’ the art.
“In the opening, Jason’s pulling out the comb, and smoking the hive, and doing all the processes,” Ayer said. “That’s real. The bees are real. He learned how to do all of that. It’s interesting, because we see him as this rough punch-up guy, and yet he got the zen of it-he really embraced the zen of beekeeping.”
Picture: Jason Statham and Jeremy Irons star in a scene from the film “The Beekeeper.” (OSV News photo/Daniel Smith, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures)