The latest Jason Statham action vehicle The Beekeeper is “John Wick with bees” in the same way that the recent Nic Cage culinary thriller Pig was “John Wick with a pig”.  Stylistically, neither film emulates the tactile, close quarters fight choreography that John Wick has inspired in the past decade of DTV action schlock.  In Pig, Nic Cage disposes of his enemies with carefully prepared meals; in The Beekeeper, Jason Statham specializes in rapidly firing guns & quips, not performing balletically brutal stunts.  However, both films do borrow from John Wick’s preposterous character motivations and worldbuilding indulgences for narrative convenience.  In John Wick, Keanu Reeves’s dog is killed by home invaders, sending him on a one-man revenge mission where he processes grief for his dead wife by avenging his favorite animal.  In Pig, Nic Cage’s pet truffle pig is kidnapped, sending him on a one-man revenge mission where he processes grief for his dead wife by avenging his favorite animal.  In The Beekeeper, Jason Statham’s beehives are blown apart by shotguns, and . . . you fill in the blanks.  All three men are pulled out of retirement for one more job, re-entering absurdly well-organized underground societies of mafiosos, chefs, and Deep State government supersoldiers, respectively.  In terms of action movie aesthetics, The Beekeeper hails from a much older style of inane shoot-em-ups that long predate John Wick, the kind of movies that star Arnold Schwarzenegger as a retired small-town American supersoldier with an unexplained Austrian accent and a crippling addiction to situational puns.  It clearly adheres to a “John Wick with bees” narrative template, though, if not only for the sake of convenience.

It may be a mistake to cite either Commando or John Wick when singing the praises of this disposable January schlock, since those comparisons set expectations a little too high.  Really, The Beekeeper is the kind of Newsmaxed out conservative fantasy that usually gets developed into a CBS procedural you’ve never heard of but tops the Nielsen ratings every week.  Thankfully, it’s an easily digestible 100min gunfight oozing with an excess of bee puns instead.  Statham stars as both a literal and a figurative beekeeper.  He was once trained as a Deep State supersoldier for a secret government agency known as The Beekeepers, who are explained to be more powerful & secretive than the FBI & CIA combined.  After retirement from the organization, he took up legitimate beekeeping – a peaceful pastime that allows him to meditate on the violence of his past while lovingly providing jars of honey to his impossibly sweet landlord.  When that beloved landlord is targeted in an online phishing scam that drains all of her bank accounts, he suddenly comes out of retirement to avenge her against the anonymous crypto bros who’ve ruined her life.  When the crypto bros strike back by killing his bees, he goes ballistic, following their trail of misbegotten funds all the way up to the White House.  There, he finds a thinly veiled avatar for Hunter Biden (Josh Hutcherson), a drug addict playboy who uses his parents’ government connections to line his own pockets with the retirement funds of kindhearted American taxpayers.  The whole ordeal culminates with Statham effectively storming the capital, guns blazing as he takes down the wrongful president of the United States and their corrupt brat kid in a storm of bullets & bee puns.

The Beekeeper is delicious rubbish with rancid politics.  Its novelty as January action schlock is twofold.  Firstly, it leans hard into the beekeeping ephemera of its premise every chance it gets.  Between kills, Statham constantly mumbles about “protecting the hive” (over his individual desires) and “smoking out the hornets” (murdering the bad guys) who threaten that hive (the elderly Republican voters of America).  When asked what his deal is when meeting anyone new, he simply explains “I keep bees.”  Enemies quickly latch onto this internal logic, taunting him with inane phrases like “Where you at, Bee Boy?”, “You’ve been a busy bee,” and, inevitably, “To bee or not to bee?”  The other source of novelty is the film’s fixation on the politics of America’s great generational divide.  Statham self-anoints himself the hero of Boomers everywhere the same way Godzilla routinely emerges from the sea to save children from other fire-breathing monsters.  While the Hunter Biden avatar he brings to justice lives in a “Metaverse meth lab” world of espresso, skateboards, sushi, and transcendental mediation, Statham often saves the day with old-school tools like ratchet straps and pickup trucks.  It’s a clash between authentic living and modern ills, one where the bad guys barter for their lives with the promise of transferred NFTs.  It doesn’t take much for that disgust with newfangled youth culture to fully tip into a hateful Conservative power fantasy.  Its pro-cop, anti-FBI paranoia over Deep State governmental control is just as well suited to director David Ayer’s history of knuckle-dragging Conservative action cinema as it is to the cursed YouTube conspiracy videos that actually prey on the elderly citizens of America every day.  There’s nothing that overtly evil to overlook in the ideology behind Pig or John Wick, but those movies also don’t prominently feature a how-to guide titled Beekeeping for Beekeepers so, you know, choose your battles.

-Brandon Ledet