The Beekeeper (2024)

Four out of five. The surprise isn't that *The Beekeeper* is dumb — it's that somebody bothered to direct it properly.

Ayer is back

David Ayer hasn't made a good film in seven years. This is comfortably his best since *Fury*, and that's my headline for it, more than anything in the plot: the action has actual authorship behind it, the shots are composed, the edit is quick without turning to soup. I walked in braced for *Meg 2*-grade schlock. *Meg 2* is a terrible film I enjoyed anyway — this is a well-made one I enjoyed for better reasons.

The gore is the draw

The set pieces are absurd in the best way, and the gore is some of the funniest and most jaw-dropping I've sat through in a while. The high point is a character hauling a minigun out of the back of a truck: completely insane, and staged well enough to land as spectacle rather than as a joke. Statham is running the British-badass routine he could do in his sleep, but there's a casualness to how he kills people here that I found weirdly delightful.

The story doesn't survive contact

The plot is the weak half, and the central conflict is trivially avoidable. His friend is scammed out of $2 million from a charity account she manages — her phone even fires a potential-fraud warning and asks her to confirm the transfer — and instead of calling the bank to reverse it, she takes her own life. It doesn't hold up. The revenge motive is legible enough after that, but the machinery moving things from scene to scene is thin, and there were stretches where I lost track of why he was doing the specific thing he was doing. A decapitation by elevator wire and two separate finger-removal scenes sit in that category: entertaining to watch, hard to explain.

Writing and cast

The script alternates between genuinely funny one-liners and some real duds. The bee puns delighted me and visibly pained my friend. Josh Hutcherson turns up as the villain, mid-resurgence after *FNAF*, and Jeremy Irons is here too. Everyone's solid.

Bottom line

Go for the action and the gore, and stay for the fact that it's made with more care than it strictly needed. Don't go looking for a plot.