The Beekeeper Is a Bad Movie That’s Good At Fighting Scams

It’s a decent public service message in a mediocre action flick.

David Ayer’s The Beekeeper is not a good movie. It’s not a good action movie. It’s not even a good Jason Statham action movie. It is, though, one of the few action movies that has almost certainly done some good in the world. That makes it simultaneously hard to recommend and hard to condemn.

If you’ve seen third or fourth tier action fare you know in general how this goes. But for what it’s worth, the specifics are: Adam Clay (that’s Statham) is a mild-mannered aging beekeeper and social recluse who rents a shed from a kind and aging educator, Mrs. Parker (Phylicia Rashad). Mrs. Parker is scammed out of all her money by a nefarious phisher (David Witts) and kills herself. Clay then sets out on a crusade of vengeance that leads him eventually, and quite improbably, to Derek Danforth (Josh Hutcherson) the son of the president of the United States, (played by Jemma Redgrave.)

Usually one man charging in to murder a child of the president of the United States wouldn’t work very well. But it turns out beekeeper Clay is a retired Jason-Bourne-like super assassin who works for an outfit called (wait for it) The Beekeepers. Coincidence?! Or! Poor screenwriting?! You decide!

Sometimes goofy screenwriting can be fun if the film itself takes some joy in its over-the-topness, a la Dev Patel’s Monkey Man. There’s precious little joy in The Beekeeper, though. The stunts are workmanlike, but not especially imaginative (compare the oil slick fight in The Transporter, as just one example.) And Clay (again, unlike many other Statham characters) is so blank and humorless he’s an uncharismatic cipher—the Terminator killer robot, but without the wit or personality.

The villain, Danforth, is similarly uninvolving; Mrs. Parker’s FBI daughter Verona (Emmy Raver-Lampton) is a hard-boiled stereotype; Danforth’s fixer Wallace is a complete waste of a Jeremy Irons bit part. I can’t for the life of me figure out why this has been a box office juggernaut. It’s deadening anonymous genre dreck.

As is often the case with deadening anonymous genre dreck, its politics are confused when they’re not actively pernicious. In real life government doesn’t do nearly enough to fight computer phishing scams, but that’s mostly because of cluelessness and ineffectuality, rather than because of direct corruption. Making the president’s son the corrupt, coke-snorting villain of the piece seems like a sideswipe at Hunter Biden—or more specifically at the right’s paranoid partisan smears of Hunter Biden. The plotline carefully avoids dealing in any way with the actual current corrupt threat, which is the orange Christofascist turd in America’s honey jar. Action movies rarely display moral courage commensurate with their supposed fearless heroes, but even by those standards this seems like an egregious cop out.

And yet. Despite its general worthlessness, there’s a case to be made that The Beekeeper, almost despite itself, performs an actual valuable civic service. The call center boondoggle at the center of the film is dressed up with a lot of mumbo jumbo about spyware, and the hacker’s ability to drain every single one of their mark’s accounts instantly with a single password is somewhat exaggerated. But the basic outlines of the scam are based on real fraud. The scammers ask people to download software; they then use that to convince the mark that they’ve accidentally transferred too much money to their account ($50,000 in this case). The mark then is convinced to try to give the money back because they don’t want the scammer to “get in trouble.”

I know this is realistic because I literally got targeted for this scam a couple of weeks back. The scammers in this case didn’t quite get any money, since I figured out something was wrong before sending them anything. But it went far enough that I had to switch my bank account, which was irritating and inconvenient.

If I’d seen this movie before I talked to these scammer assholes, I would have caught on to the scam a good bit earlier and would have avoided a good bit of misery and anxiety. And a lot of people have seen this movie! Which means a lot of people who might have fallen for scams like this are better informed and more likely to be able to protect themselves.

The Beekeeper is a shit movie. But inside that shit movie is a pretty good public service message. You now know the public service message, which makes seeing the film largely superfluous. Still, most movies don’t have any compelling reason to exist. This one does. I’ve got to give it points for that.