Jason Statham in ‘The Beekeeper’ (Credit: Daniel Smith/Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures)
The Beekeeper should have failed. It is a late-era Jason Statham film, from a post-Suicide Squad, post-Bright David Ayer, dumped in January. Everything on paper said it should have failed, relegated to eventual screaming to watch at 1 a.m. on a Tuesday when you’re bored and have insomnia. Instead, it beat expectations. So we’re getting a sequel.
At the end of September, they announced that filming had started for The Beekeeper 2. But throughout the year I’ve seen people bring up the movie, enjoying it for the sight of Statham effortlessly carving his way through henchmen to fight tech bros who operate giant scam operations.
For the last few months I’ve had a theory about why this film became such a hit and captured people’s attention: It’s the one piece of modern media to acknowledge and address the rampant plague of scammers out there. And by address I mean acknowledge it, use it as a plot point, and let Jason Statham embark on a methodical and relentless mission to kill them all. And he does, ruthlessly and efficiently.
In the film, Statham is a retired “Beekeeper,” an elite secret agent with a bee-themed methodology who works as an actual beekeeper now helping a sweet and kind rich lady played by Phylicia Rashad. When she is scammed via a phone call and kills herself after losing all of her money for charity, Statham comes out of retirement to take out the operation. “Phylicia Rashad is kind of America’s mom, and to see her get victimized by these jackals is such great motivation for a hero to come in and fix things,” Ayer told me when I interviewed him for Task & Purpose last year.
And these aren’t average looking people in drab computer offices. The scammers have large office buildings. They have weird runway gala-type theatrics as the supervisors guide people through how to trick somebody into handing over their money. One supervisor wears a suit covered in dollar signs. Subtle, The Beekeeper is not. And it doesn’t need to be. And that’s as the film brings Statham in conflict with their supervisor, a totally not-Mark Zuckerberg type who has dozens of special operations guys trying to protect him.
The movie is absurd, but the underlying premise is not. The deluge of scam calls and emails is universal. Phishing emails have brought down political careers. The annoying phone calls, impersonating government offices or creditors, they cross state and ideological lines. It’s a bipartisan nuisance, and it hurts independents too. According to the Pew Research Center, roughly three-quarters of Americans have had people attempt to do online scams or attacks on them.
In the 2000s, Congress established the National Do Not Call Registry in the face of widespread anger over endless telemarketer calls. It made a noticeable difference, cutting down the deluge of often late-in-the-day calls to homes. Two decades later, what’s been done? Everything is a grift, from random bots online to people in the halls of power. The infestation of scammers in our society has caused real harm. In 2020 during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, contact tracing efforts fell apart because people didn’t want to answer their phones because any calls these days were likely scammers, telling us they’re from the “Motor Vehicle Department” or want to talk to us about our car’s extended warranty. You know those calls, you’ve gotten those calls. In the time since Ayer and Statham’s movie was released things have gotten worse as a whole. As David Dayen at The American Prospect (where I occasionally write, for full disclosure) wrote, we’re in the “The Golden Age of Scams” as the Trump administration dismantles consumer protections, cryptocurrency schemes soar and more. If no one is going to do something about reining this in, then maybe we can live vicariously through Jason Statham rampaging through the various theft and fraud operations.
And it’s not as if The Beekeeper is some revelatory film. It’s shockingly straightforward and schlocky. The action is so-so, the kind of thing you’d expect from a late-era Statham movie released in the January dump window. There’s a scene where Statham beats up a half dozen heavily armored FBI SWAT agents while dozens more stand around in eyesight but don’t notice. It’s a film where Statham talks in nonstop bee-related metaphors and seems to think like a bee, and yet does not kill people with honey, a swarm of bees or even a hornets nest. He just uses fists and guns. They denied us bee-related kills. Somehow.
So what’s the deal with The Beekeeper 2? Unclear. The plot is mostly underwraps, but presumably Statham will continue to describe society as “the hive” and struggle to talk for more than two sentences without mentioning bees. Timo Tjahjanto, who made the ultra gory Indonesia action thriller The Night Comes for Us and helmed the less gory but still action heavy Nobody 2, is directing this time, so presumably the fight scenes will be solid. It’s the golden age of scams and until Congress does something about it, we have to put our hopes and revenge dreams against scammers in the hands of Jason Statham.