There is a moment in The Beekper, David Ayer’s latest attempt to walk off Suicide Squad, where Jason Statham barges into an office of the film’s antagonistic Phishing Scam conglomerate, and asks everyone in the office raise their right hand and swear that they will, ‘never steal from the weak and the vulnerable again.’ The scammer closest to Statham asks who the hell this tastefully bald man is and what he’s doing in their office, then has his face rearranged for about 10 seconds. Afterwards, Statham begins pouring gasoline all over the call centre, sets the place alight, then does a cool walk away from the explosion to his truck, which was a shot I thought was great and would love to see more of in future action productions. During this sequence, the chair I was sitting in during my 4DX screening of The Beekeeper gave me a small taste of what it must be like to be caught as an undercover cop embedded in the Mexican cartel. I was beaten, thrown around, had my ankles and throat nicked, beaten some more then doused in a drip-drip-drip stream of water with the stench of petrol filling my nose. I got my ass kicked and covered in petrol by a chair that had popcorn ingrained into its seat and the mere image of Jason Statham made it happen. Who said movie stars don't exist any more?

The chair that kept thrashing me around mercilessly, like a beetle trapped in a jar owned by a kid who was already a little shit but now his parents are divorcing and all bets are off, was probably the most enjoyable part of The Beekeeper. It’s definitely the only part of the experience clear to me, well-defined in my memory. I wish I could be one of the people for whom hearing actors with very serious faces say stupid shit like ‘Thanks for putting up with me and also my bees’ and ‘That’s the one thing Beekeepers never do- stand down’ is enough to sate me but it isn’t. I’ve seen Black Dynamite. I’ve seen Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. I’ve drunk heartily from the well and I won’t stoop to the puddle to try and secure a letterboxd review that gets over 5 likes.

The Beekeeper follows Adam Clay, but I’m gonna call him Jason Statham and you’re gonna call him Jason Statham so let’s just declutter this review from here on, as he seeks revenge on the higher ups of a multi-million dollar phishing scam ring whose thievery targeted Eloise, Statham’s elderly… friend? Landlord? Their relationship seems to be one of warmth and fondness but also one apparently based entirely around how glad she is that he can control his bees while he’s living in her barn and how glad he is that she doesn’t mind his bees. I think he pays rent in jars of honey, also? I hope I’m not going to start talking myself around to this film. Alas, Eloise is phished and has millions of dollars taken from her personal accounts and the account of a children’s charity that she manages. Of course then, the only option for a beloved elderly pillar of the community who was very obviously scammed out of money kept in insured banks is to immediately shoot herself in the head. Tragic. 74… she was just a kid… 

Now, I’m aware that I’m not really reviewing this film as much as I am describing the plot to you like some kind of annoying youtuber who makes videos about plot holes in children’s films, but I think doing this is the best way to convey the time I had with The Beekeeper. 

…Alright. Fine.

The action is fine enough in terms of the beats and general choreography of almost every fight but is massively harmed by every shot having an incredibly artificial and overzealous camera shake applied to it, like it’s an episode of The One Show and they’re doing a bit where the studio shakes, the hosts say ‘What’s going on?!’ and then Daleks roll in. The script is really bad, and there are maybe only six lines of dialogue that are bad enough to make me think that might be on purpose so I’m not going to give it the benefit of the doubt. The performances are universally phoned in, which I truly respect. Imagine being the guy who actually gave 100% in The Beekeeper, it would be like turning up to school forgetting it's a non-uniform day. Well, someone did. Josh Hutcherson is unfortunately notably worse than the rest of the cast because he’s very desperately trying to be the best of the cast, and ends up giving a performance that is somewhere between the worst Far Cry villain and the skits they sometimes do at the end of Epic Rap Battles Of History videos. The score is pretty forgettable too- if there even was a score- but I’ve just seen Poor Things and The Holdovers so maybe my ears were simply not ready to hear anything below phenomenal in the background of my Jason Statham movie and have given me temporary selective deafness to all other film music. There was also an incredibly odd moment where 2011-era dubstep scored an important scene at the end of Act 3.

I’m making that up, there was no dubstep. But dear God, see how you believed it for a moment there.

So yeah, the film is bad and I must stress that it is nowhere near as funny as people are going to tell you it is. I always fear the quotable piece of shit, a film that has just enough silly lines of dialogue or just enough moments of weirdness that when recounted out of context, make it seem far more interesting or enjoyable than it really is. I must stress this to you, because I’m about to describe what a ‘Beekeeper’ is in the world of The Beekeeper. Okay? Remember, it is not good. Got that? No matter what I’m about to describe or how I phrase it, you mustn’t pay anything more to watch it than the subscription fee for whatever service it ends up on by March should you already happen to have it. Alright, I’m trusting you here.

Okay, like I was saying, it turns out Jason Statham is a ‘Beekeeper’. Now, ‘Beekeepers’ in this world are basically vigilantes with complete carte blanche and unlimited resources employed by the US government to deal with threats internally within political and governmental systems. At least, I think that’s what they do. Their missions and purposes are only ever explained through bee analogies. They ‘protect the hive’, they ‘kill the queen if she begins producing weak bees’, they ‘target hornets that infiltrate the nest’ and they, ‘drink sugar water put out for them by girls who saw it on TikTok whenever they get sleepy.’ The thing is, Beekeepers don’t have to be undercover as actual Beekeepers. They’re not spies and they’re not clandestine operatives in the world of honey production, so I can only assume- and I am not even trying to do a bit here if you can believe it- that in this world, the American Government specifically seeks out autistic, highly-achieving soldiers whose special interest is beekeeping and asks them to be vigilantes with no oversight for whom assassinating elected officials without permission is not off the table as long as they can provide a solid beekeeping-analogy for why it will benefit ‘the hive’ of the USA at large. I needed to write that down. I needed to make sense of it the same way I have to use my notes app nowadays to do sums like long division and 13.71 - 1.25 (it’s 12.54).

Just looking at that paragraph fills me with indignation, not because I dislike the idea of something that ridiculous and uniquely silly being the basis of an action film, but because it is a vehicle for absurdity and comedy completely squandered in a film so uninterested in being anything more than a January release covered in the offputting veneer of all straight-to-streaming slop that was only underhand-tossed into theatres because the studios noticed there was fuck all out this month except for the Mean Girls musical. The boys and Dads needed a movie too! At least, the straight ones did.

For better or worse, however, The Beekeeper is now one of the few cinema first experiences of my life. The first film I ever saw was Looney Toons: Back In Action, the first film I ever saw in 3D was Gulliver’s Travels, the first film I ever saw alone was The Favourite, the first film I ever saw in IMAX was Dune and the first film I ever saw in 4DX was David Ayer’s The Beekeeper. It wasn’t all bad. Sure, me and the chair had our differences at first but I look back at those times, where I chose to scratch my face during a calm moment that happened to be before a jumpscare that jerked the chair too suddenly and made me punch myself in the eye, and I smile. Hell, I laugh. The chair had my back not only literally, but emotionally. Many people use the word ‘back’ to refer to asses. It had that also. It knew that I thought I was in for a tongue-in-cheek action movie that would play into the blandness of modern Statham fare, it could sense how disappointed I was becoming, and the chair chose to step up and make me feel something itself. Sure, it was rough, but it knew I could take it. The chair knew exactly when I realised the pervasive sweet smell in the cinema was not the scent of honey pumped into the screening to get everyone in a beekeeping mood, but was just the smell of the woman behind me eating a bag of fudge cubes, and it chose to make the one smell it had one of my favourites, petrol. Oh, chair. I know you didn’t mean to hurt me. It was my fault, really.

I look up. The film is over. The credits are rolling. I share a knowing chuckle to the couple next to me who just agreed that The Beekeeper was shit. Well chair, it’s been real. I liked the part where a Secret Service agent was sheared in half by a plummeting lift and you rammed a bar into my back to imitate the feeling of being sliced in twain. You hit me and it felt like a massage.

I put on my jacket and turn to leave, but… 

I turn to the chair. Its sad eyes meet mine, and widen with anticipation. I give it a smile, and gesture with my shoulder, as if to say ‘let’s get out of here, buddy’. 

“Y-You really mean it?” asks the chair, with what I think is a mix of disbelief and tears in its voice.

“Sure I do, you were great back there.” I reply. The chair has now joined me. We walk side by side into the night outside the cinema.

“Did you really think I did great, Louis?”

“Of course. You were the bee's knees.”

We laugh and we laugh, side-by-side, hungry for adventure and simply happy to not be alone in the world on this cold winter’s night. As we walk, enjoying the silence of the world, I reach for my pocket at the same time the chair swings its arms and our hands brush for just a moment, a far-too-quick moment. We do not say anything. We allow the moment to disappear, cascade into history like a grain of sand in an hourglass. We didn’t even look at eachother. I lost touch with the chair sometime in the Summer of 2025, it went travelling I think, somewhere out in Asia. I guess it always did love an adventure. Always wanted more out of life than we had here, more than I could ever give it, no matter how badly I wanted to. Before it got on its plane it told me, “make sure to cook a big turkey, I’ll be back before Christmas!” It’s been forty-three years since that night. I met a girl. Fell in love. Had a big wedding. Raised some beautiful kids who raised beautiful kids of their own. Sometimes I go out to the back porch, sit on my swinging bench and smoke on this hickory wood pipe I’ve got. Doctor tells me it’s no good for me, but hell, something’s gotta give. Sometimes, when the sky turns pinky-orange and the tobacco runs out, I’ll take a look at my hands before I head inside. I picked up a few liver spots over the years, I ain’t ashamed to say, but I can still see it. Oh yes, I can still see that patch of skin on the back of my hand where we touched on that cold winter’s night. If you look close enough, you can almost see a scar. I still set a place for the chair every Christmas. I enjoy my wife’s turkey and put a paper crown on the head of a new grandchild every year, it seems. But I’m distracted. I always have one eye on the back of my hand, and the other on the door. Waiting. Just waiting.

“Bruce Lee was just so lightning-fast. People try to emulate him 

in whatever way they can, but to try and do what he was doing... 

you're just inspired by it; you're not trying to say, 'Look, I can do that.'

 No one can do what he did.”

- Jason Statham