Quick Synopsis: After his friend Eloise kills herself in shame after being the victim of a phishing scam, Adam Clay goes on a roaring rampage of revenge.

If you like Jason Statham films, you’ll enjoy The Beekeeper. Actually, that’s incorrect, if you LOVE Jason Statham films, you’ll enjoy this. If you’re on the fence about him as a performer, this isn’t going to change your mind. It’s standard Statham-ware (Not Stathamwear of course, which is his fashionline). It’s actually got quite good reviews so far and I have to be honest; I don’t get it. I never really saw it get better than average. Nothing about it is memorable, not in a good way anyway. The action scenes really should be better. There are a few exceptions; the destruction of the call centre early on is deliciously cathartic, but those moments are few and far between. On the plus side, the action scenes are comprehensible, which is more than could be said for a lot of recent action films. Comprehensibility does not mean excitement though, I don’t find Humpty Dumpty exciting, even if I can understand it (it’s about breakfast, right?). As anyone who watched the first Suicide Squad movie can attest, as a director, Ayer knows how to create colourful shots. But he doesn’t know necessarily how to make them exciting. He just seems to think that adding purple neon makes a shot dynamic.

Similar accusations of laziness can be directed at the performances. It’s a weirdly talented cast; Minnie Driver, Phylicia Rashad, and Jeremy Irons. Performers like that should elevate the film and bring it up to a higher level. Instead, it feels like the film is dragging them down. For example, Statham does a weird not quite English/not quite American accent.

In their defence, the script doesn’t really give them much to work with. It’s hard to deliver a good performance when you have to give some of the worst dialogue ever committed to film. Some films improve when you think about them, this actually seems like it gets worse the more you think about it. Not in a “plot holes reveal themselves when you think about them” way, but for the events of this film to happen, certain things must have happened or will happen after the film ends. In this universe, “Beekeepers” is the name of an organisation of highly trained assassins who operate and kill with complete impunity from the law. I’m not quite sure how they’re funded, it possibly mentioned it but I stopped caring. But what makes it weird is the idea that their training library includes not only “How To Sneak Past Things” by “S.Tealth”, and “How To Fight” by “That Guy In The Pub Who Doesn’t Have Training But When He’s In The Zone You Totally Better Watch Out, Bro. fka. Keith”, but also “The Naked Apiarist; Elementry Mistakes In Beekeeping”. Statham’s character really commits to the bit, by actually keeping bees after he retires from the service. Weirdly enough, it’s only his beekeeping that alerts people to the organisation in the first place. If he stopped living the gimmick and started an alpaca farm, then the bad guys wouldn’t have had a clue how to identify him, so they wouldn’t have set so many highly trained killers on him.

I’d also like to see more of what happens after this film. It’s been revealed that the president’s son is behind a multinational operation that scams people’s life savings from them. and used that money to fund the election campaign. How would the world react to that? That’s the most interesting part of the story, and it’s not in the film itself.

In summary, an incredibly frustrating watch. If it was more in-depth and intelligent that would have allowed it to say something important about corruption and election funding. Although, in some ways, if it was trashier, that would improve it too. As it is, it’s stuck in this middle ground between shlock and serious, so just ends up shlerious, which isn’t a word. It does have one huge plus for it though; it genuinely is an incredibly effective way of teaching basic cyber security to those who aren’t that computer literate. Okay, all that lesson is is “don’t give your bank details to a stranger”, but you know, baby steps.

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