Here’s an honest confession: I like David Ayer as a filmmaker and writer, even when he’s making studio dreck. Ayer, who came to prominence with the screenplays for U-571 and Training Day, has largely spent much of his career as a director cultivating a style described as “decaf S. Craig Zahler,” where his more-audience palatable style pairs nicely with exploitation-adjacent subject matter. End of Watch and Fury are realer-than-real cinema, emphasizing the grime inherent to their settings, while works like the highly-underrated Sabotage and the much-maligned Suicide Squad exist as maximalist expressions of ugliness – high camp outfitted in shock garb. That last film is the fulcrum that the last decade of Ayer’s career has revolved around: He was trashed for a misfire that he only played a part in (WB, once a “director’s studio,” engaged in plenty of behind-the-scenes manipulation in order to ensure that it was a proper competitor to Marvel) but even in its worst state, it’s still a fascinating cultural object, with its odd combination of rich and garish style, ludicrous subject matter, and desperate pandering. He’s spent a number of years protesting the fact that he’ll likely never get a chance to do what Zack Snyder did with his Justice League, but Ayer managed something that few of his competitors could: he created something genuinely memorable, even if it lives in infamy in the minds of those who can quote chapter and verse from the various books in the Feige Gospel. His last film, The Tax Collector, was buried by the pandemic calendar, but his latest, the Jason Statham thriller The Beekeeper, is a return to prominence both at the multiplex and with regard to his status as a creator of campy and glorious action.
Working from a script penned by Sons of Anarchy creator Kurt Wimmer, The Beekeeper takes the framework of the John Wick series (one lone badass, emerging from hidden societies, has to take on forces of overwhelming power and does so with ease), places it directly in Massachusetts, and makes it as amusing as possible. Sabotage is the operative comparison here, given that the entire production has its tongue firmly in cheek, though it’s a little less lurid. His central character, Jason Statham (Jason Statham), is a trucker-hat-sporting Carhartt-wearing Roger Moore, a benign oddity whose quest for revenge takes him to the highest seats of power in the United States, with a body count in the dozens, each increase dutifully recited by the FBI agents assigned to follow the case. See, Statham’s status as a beekeeper has two meanings. The dude actually suits up and tends to his hives, giving honey to his neighbors and helping them rid their barns of hornets, but he’s also a Beekeeper, who is an assassin operating outside of the boundaries of normal law, given carte blanche to do whatever he can to preserve the “natural order.”
Like John Wick and its imitators, The Beekeeper’s central conflict emerges from a small-scale crime, although it’s one of legitimate relevance to the boomers who will watch this on TNT (to the point that I wish Ayer had actually done a Tony Scott-style “This Can Actually Happen To You” subtitle on the bottom the screen during the sequence): One of his beloved neighbors (Phyllisa Rashad) falls victim to a call-center scam and has her accounts drained, much like you’d see in a Kitboga video on YouTube. She takes her own life, devastating her FBI agent daughter (Emmy Raver-Lampman), and Statham is a person of interest, at least until the cops realize he had nothing to do with it.
Now, scams like this normally come from outfits operating overseas, but for our purposes, it’s lucky that this outfit is located just a few miles away from the Springfield suburb in which our main character lives. So, he does what every well-meaning person wishes they could and drives to their offices, where a bunch of the Wolf of Wall Street D-Team work their marks and burns the place to the ground. He doesn’t stop there, as he makes his way across the state towards Boston, killing anybody sent to challenge him in brutal – and often very funny – ways, all while confounding the innocent government agents sent to follow him. One big thing separating Statham from Wick is his sense of justice, as Wick is the walking manifestation of “Fuck Around and Find Out,” while Statham is keenly aware of his status as an arbiter, a judge, jury, and executioner given carte blanche to do what he needs to do. It’s never laid on too thick, but it separates it from other Wick imitators, and Statham’s odd gravitas (think For Your Eyes Only) is a nice contrast to Reeves’ shell-shocked vibe.
It soon emerges that his target is a millennial businessman (a hilarious Josh Hutcherson), whose evil deeds are concealed by his handler, a former CIA director (Jeremy Irons), doing whatever he can to protect this asshole’s mom, who just so happens to be… the President of these United States. So, the question ultimately becomes: Will Statham actually kill the President? Or will the FBI, including the neighbor’s bereaved daughter, manage to stop him? The answers might surprise you, but what shouldn’t is just how ludicrously entertaining it is to watch Statham at work, casually serving up justice to losers with band saws, electrical cords, fire extinguishers, elevators, and… staplers, like the ones on Milton’s desk in Office Space.
Now, before anyone starts frothing at the mouth and takes to their social media platform of choice to yell about Burisma or fishing-expedition witch hunts, it should be duly noted that both Ayer and Wimmer go out of their way to ensure that this has little connection to any current political events. Hutcherson is a goofy crypto bro hyped over massages, zen, and DMT, which accurately describes the children of so many politicians that it just becomes broad, and his mother is presented in a flagrantly apolitical fashion (though some might shout about Killary or whatever, ignoring the bevy of similar politicians on the other side of the aisle). Its politics mainly revolve around the exploitation of the vulnerable, which is an evil that most sane people can agree on being such, and even that mild articulation of “bad thing is bad” never gets in the way of this being a flagrantly good time at the movies. In some ways, this is a stylistic departure for Ayer, as the tatted-up mercs and killers of his previous films really don’t show up until the third act, and his choice of Statham as a lead is a swell echo of the late-period style that the actor and Guy Ritchie have established over the last few years.
It feels like Ayer has learned from Ritchie’s example: After a period of studio strife and subsequent misfires, it’s still possible for a filmmaker to refocus on what brings them joy and have everyone, the audience included, reap the rewards. This is, after all, a film in which Statham takes down a Cyberpunk-styled assassin at a gas station, amid a hail of tracer fire from a truck-mounted mini-gun, by throwing a big-ass mason jar full of honey at her head. You don’t get too many delights like that in a January slate.