'The Beekeeper' review: Jason Statham's B(ee)-grade action flick fails to make a buzz

Spoiler alert! This article contains spoilers for the film, "The Beekeeper."

"To be(e) or not to be(e), that is the question."

No, this is not a reference to the famous soliloquy featured in William Shakespeare's play "Hamlet" or a quote from the 2007 animated film, "Bee Movie."

This line was delivered in complete and utter seriousness by Jason Statham's character Adam Clay in the 2024 film "The Beekeeper" and is just one of many bee-related puns that make up the one-hour-and-45-minute action flick.

Despite mentions of the winged species in practically every scene, "The Beekeeper," which debuts in theaters Friday, has very little to do with the pollinating creatures. Instead, viewers can expect a superficial commentary on ageism and the ongoing conflict between older and younger generations in the form of a typical '80s-style, B-grade action film.

Set in present day, the movie follows Clay, a mysterious beekeeper whose quiet life is turned upside down when his neighbor and friend Eloise Parker, played by Phylicia Rashad, commits suicide after falling victim to a phishing scam that causes her to lose her life savings.

Distraught over Parker's untimely passing, Clay decides to embark on a quest for revenge. On this journey, he learns that the scammers are part of a larger organization called United Data Group (UDG), led by a man named Derek Danforth, played by Josh Hutcherson. But this tech-bro criminal group is no match for Clay, a retired member of the Beekeepers, a top-secret government agency that breeds superhuman-like spies who are death-defying and unstoppable.

After taking out several UDG members, burning down one of the group's operating facilities and making the audience suffer through a few more eye-rolling bee jokes ("Who the f--k are you, Winnie-the-Pooh?" and "You've been a busy bee"), the vigilante finally shuts down the operation. He accomplishes this mission by killing Danforth and exposing UDG's affiliation with the fictional United States president, who is the mother of the film's antagonist and played by Jemma Redgrave.

It would be relatively easy to say that "The Beekeeper" is just another Blockbuster action movie filled with cheap one-liners and an endless montage of fighting scenes and explosions. But what you may also glean from this film is a shallow analysis of the divide between older generations, specifically baby boomers and Generation X, and their youthful counterparts, millennials and Generation Z.

In the film, directed by David Ayer, the scammers are loud-mouth 20-something-year-olds who prey on the elderly and have no respect for authority, except for their boss, Danforth, who is perhaps the quintessential example of what baby boomers claim is wrong with kids today.

With his frosted tips and flippant attitude, "nepo baby" Danforth is seen trapezing through his multimillion-dollar office on a skateboard, highlighting the younger generation's lack of respect for the social rules their parents and grandparents put in place.

But rules aren't the only thing Danforth detests. The character also seems to have an aversion to anyone over 40 years old, including his No. 1 henchman and problem-solver Wallace Westwyld, played by Jeremy Irons, who is a geriatric man nearly 30 years his senior and the prime recipient of his aggression.

Danforth also has a complicated relationship with his mother, threatening to kill the commander-in-chief to save himself after she threatens to expose him for defrauding the U.S. government by using his illegal funds to support her presidential campaign.

The only "good" young people shown in this film are the two morally driven FBI agents, one of whom happens to be Parker's daughter, played by Emmy Raver-Lampman. Perhaps their allegiance to the U.S. and commitment to the rule of law allows them to transcend millennial stereotypes.

In comes Statham, the white knight of the middle class, whose real purpose in life is to defend the most vulnerable group in society from the entitled hipsters. He succeeds only minutes after President Danforth was willing to turn over her son to the feds because, of course, you have to "keep the hive safe." The hive in question is American society at large.

But like the many bee analogies riddled throughout the movie, this message of class and generational conflict doesn't quite land. But you can't blame Statham's and Hutcherson's performance. The British actor and Union, Kentucky native excel at embodying their two-dimensional characters as accurately as one would imagine.

It's the script by Kurt Wimmer, along with Ayer's direction, that fails to provide any nuance to the subject by discussing how older generations hold most of this country's political and economic power.

While watching "The Beekeeper," I often wondered how many of the film's scammers saw themselves as vigilantes, too, stealing retirement money from the senior population as retaliation for the fact that social security trust funds will likely be depleted by 2041, long before any of them can reap the benefits of the federal program that is supposed to provide financial protection for all of our nation's people. Maybe they just wanted a piece of the American pie before it was too late.

Or maybe they're greedy criminals. But we'll never know because "The Beekeeper" never goes beyond its genre-specific tropes to address this complicated topic.

How could it, when even Statham's character maintains so much elusiveness that the audience never gains a sense of who he is? In fact, we learn so little about any of the characters, just that the bad guys are young, the good guys are old and, somehow, all roads lead to bees.

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Review: 'The Beekeeper,' a B-grade action film not worth the buzz