The Beekeeper – 2024

Depicting bad governments doing bad things has been a genre of cinema since the 1970's when real gov't scandals overwhelmed the news and made the topic not as controversial as it had been (when Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington premiered in 1939 it was pooh-poohed by a number of Senators and Congressmen for its depiction of high-level corruption as being too fantastic, a notion long since shelved in pop culture).

In the 21st century, The Beekeeper is about a secret organization of super-agents who safeguard the United States by being outside and beyond the control (and almost even the knowledge of) other agencies. Jason Statham plays a retired "beekeeper," who literally raise bees and jars up honey, who is forced back into action when a personal tragedy awakens him to the fact the "balance of the hive" (i.e., the country) is threatened. A secret, but not too secret major corporation is involved in an octopus-like spamming operation using altered gov't software on the internet to specifically target senior citizens. Using psychological techniques to empty their bank accounts with their confused but earnest cooperation is heartlessly portrayed as being driven by an army of phone-spam artists who work in competition with each other in large rooms spread around the country. There is a carnival-like atmosphere to their rooms (inside of respectable looking office towers) where giant TV screens and banks of computers help these professional crooks scoop up retirement accounts, which The Beekeeper shows us as, incredibly, technically legal.

When it turns out this massive fraud organization is a money-pumping tool that helped a past presidential campaign and is run by a "protected" son of a president, Statham's super agent Beekeeper has an impossible task ahead to adjudicate the problem because the spam operation is encircled not just with high-end legal protection (an ex-CIA director has the job) but by the FBI, Secret Service and other gov't agencies. The degree of which these federal government agencies are deceived about what's really going on is explored, as is the particular participation of a FBI agent (played by Emmy Raver-Lampman) whose mother committed suicide after having her entire financial world wiped out by the fraud organization Statham's Beekeeper begins to systematically destroy, location by location.

As a metaphor for contemporary political scandals and lawfare, The Beekeeper is pretty easy to parse, but as an action-film in which an avenging super-agent is simply pointing himself in the direction of bad guys and energetically and inventively taking them down, this film from Director David Ayers excels.

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Original Page July 20, 2024