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"The Beekeeper" is a violent revenge fantasy that centers on a brooding male loner with a secret background and lethal skills who comes out of retirement when his is killed or kidnapped. There is a nod to the cinematic past in this fantasy. The title character is a man of mystery who goes by the name Adam Clay. Adam decides to burn the call center to the ground when his friend, a kindly mother, takes her own life. Find him and order a hit squad to kill him.
It would not be the last time an allusion would arise to a far, far better way to spend your time, at a recent screening of the film. The comparison of "Beekeeper" to the John Wick franchise was an accurate one, but only in the broadest, clumsiest sense. Adam murders his victims with the efficiency of Liam Neeson, as he zeroes in on the boy who has taken refuge in a Mar-a-Lago-like seaside compound with his mother. The high point is early, when Adam sends careening, in a graceful arcs, off a tall drawbridge, after he sawed off Garnett's fingers.
Jeremy Irons is a former CIA director who is the film's main role. Adam is a keeper of bees in the film and he is tending to bees on the property as the film opens. He is a veteran of a covert CIA operation called the Beekeeper program, which is meant to protect the integrity of the human hive. Sometimes a rogue worker must rise up from the anonymous mass to kill and replace a queen when the colony's functioning gets out of whack. The dialogue is thick and fast at times, making it difficult to execute the action. David Ayer has been on a downward slide as a director since he made "End of Watch" and "Fury". The ending of the film is perfectly poised for this kind of slickly produced, hindbrain pulp, if the film ever finds its audience, and it is all too clear that there is a market for it.
There is strong violence throughout, pervasive crude language, some sexual references and drug use.