By Geno McGahee
There was a time when action films were done right. Action stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jean Claude Van Damme and Sly Stallone were pumping out film after film and just beating down a bunch of goons and some final boss bad guy. When that time passed, action films sort of lost their way, but when I saw the trailer for THE BEEKEEPER, I began to think that maybe we are on the beginning of a return to form.
Clay (Jason Statham) is living a quiet life as a beekeeper, making honey and looking out for his elderly neighbor, Eloise (Phylicia Rashad). As Eloise works on her laptop, a message pops up saying her computer was compromised, leading to one of the more popular scams that target the elderly. After being totally cleaned out of her life savings, she takes her own life.
I must say two things here. One, Rashad has aged incredibly well. The other thing is that the film is set in Springfield, Massachusetts, and it didn’t look like Springfield to me. Where were the junkies? Where were the homeless people with signs asking for money? That Springfield looked great in THE BEEKEEPER….maybe it’s set in an alternate dimension where they cleaned it up.
Agent Parker (Emmy Raver-Lampman), Eloise’s daughter, and her partner, Agent Wiley (Bobby Naderi), begin investigating the matter, but there’s somebody else planning on getting revenge his own way. Clay is ready to take revenge and heads over to the scamming headquarter building and we get some great action here. Statham is great in this film and watching him enter the building with two gas cans and kicking everyone’s ass is a lot of fun.
The big boss of the scamming network, Derek Danforth (Josh Hutcherson), sends some goons to kill Clay and they start by shooting up his bees. It’s a bad idea and they pay for it in gruesome ways, including one of my favorite deaths where he cuts off a guy’s fingers and then ties him to a truck and drives him off a bridge. It is hilarious.
The only person that really understands the danger of Clay is Wallace (Jeremy Irons), a former CIA bigwig. The Beekeeper program is a government program where the elite soldiers take care of “the hive”, systematically killing until they reach the queen bee. The queen bee here is the mother of Derek, the President of the United States, (Jemma Redgrave).
As the bodies pile up, Parker and Wiley continue to pursue Clay, leading to a finale that features more guys getting their asses kicked. THE BEEKEEPER is an action film that follows the old formula that worked in the 80s and it works now. Statham does a great job as Clay and they laid a foundation to build off this film.
Thankfully, THE BEEKEEPER did well at the box office and showed that there is a demand for these sorts of films. I really enjoyed it and the bad guys in this was perfect. Who wouldn’t like to see all of these scammers that take money from people taken out in the most brutal of ways? This is a fun film and I highly recommend it.
