It’s important to engage with art on its own terms — to look at what is there, rather than what you want to be there. But part of that is looking at what is not there, or maybe where the art does not go despite the opportunity. This is what is frustrating about The Beekeeper, an action movie with a great premise and interesting subtext that fails to follow through on its promise.

The film wastes no time setting up battle lines, as kindly old Phylicia Rashad is scammed out of all her money by phishers/con artists and kills herself. Jason Statham, who works on her farm keeping bees, decides to take the scammers down. There is no more loathsome group than this kind of criminal, who doesn’t just rely on unwise computer behavior but works to personally snooker info out of their confused mark, and David Witts is nicely despicable as the guy who rips off Rashad. Death Wish, But For Phishers is a brilliant idea and Statham beating the shit out of Witts’ goons before burning their call center to the ground is immediately satisfying. But this is just one facility of the central scamming operation, and Statham is going all the way to the top.

The top is a huge douchebag (an even more detestable Josh Hutcherson) introduced riding a skateboard in his open office, getting a fancy latte from his personal coffee bar on the way to meditation classes. He is a barely coherent amalgam of hipster and tech bro and most importantly a Young(-ish) Person, like Witts, and his relative youth is clearly the fount of all his bad qualities. It turns out Hutcherson came up with an algorithm that searches out old and relatively isolated people to focus that phishing scam on, and the dynamic of helpless old people being under attack from callow young ones — and needing the protection of the relatively spry mid-50s Statham — is the kind of raw generational fear that might not be true but gives a charge to a standard action flick.

However, writer Kurt Wimmer is looking for another charge. As the ads and other reviews are quick to note, Statham’s beekeeper is actually a retired Beekeeper, a member of a secret society charged with “protecting the hive,” which comes down to preserving the rule of law or something by using maximum force with unaccountable government resources. It is post-Wickian po-faced lore and utter fucking nonsense and at certain points the film acknowledges this. A certain line from Hamlet is repurposed as Schwarzeneggerian witticism and Jeremy Irons’ ex-CIA director is given the task of info-dropping the whole Beekeeper setup, he does so in the cadence and emphasis of the excitable beekeeper from the Simpsons episode with the sugar pile and I cannot be(e)lieve that is a coincidence. 

I also cannot roll with the John Wick films’ increasing backstory, but at least those movies commit to it fully. Wimmer and director David Ayer commit to nothing here. The Beekeeper introduces Statham’s replacement — another young person, with outre hair and clothing! Disgraceful! — and he immediately kills her in a pretty funny scene. That’s it for any more Beekeeping shenanigans, though. And while Statham gets off one superb bit of ownage (the victim goes out blathering about how he’ll pay Statham off in NFTs, hilarious), he lets various low-level call center scammers go on multiple occasions instead of killing the shit out of them, Charles Bronson would never. Statham has an excellent knife fight with Taylor James, who is channeling Vernon Wells in Commando, but Ayer spends much of the film making sure Statham is only wounding the many cops and troops on his trail. 

This is all generally watchable, I had a good enough time and suspect this would play even better with booze and friends, but the film really turns chickenshit at the end. It lets the most powerful old people in the country be gullible idiots instead of part of the sinister conspiracy working on their behalf; this feels less like an extension of the old/young conflict running through the movie and more like the filmmakers’ own conspiracy to flatter the audience. Even worse, the movie leaves certain people alive in the hopes of a sequel instead of giving the viewer the satisfaction of assholes getting owned. The Beekeeper is constantly pulling its punches, finding a middle ground between the ludicrous Statham of Crank and the coldly vengeful Statham of the underrated Wrath of Man that isn’t as pleasing as either. Put another way, it waffles on Shakespeare’s essential question to the action movie: To be or not to be?