The Beekeeper – phishing scammer suffers digital loss amongst other acts of revenge in this unbeelievable tale

A retired asset from a deniable squad of violent fixers who have agency to keep the US on the straight and narrow abandons his beekeeping and decides to avenge the death of a sweet lady off whom he rents a barn. He works his way through a hive of online scamsters to find that the honey leads to the most well-connected family in the country.

The Beekeeper features a high body count with civilian casualties and plenty of innocent deaths of bumbling law enforcement officers alongside the misbeehaving bad guys – with some darkly comedy moments – as Adam Clay (Jason Statham) goes on a beestly killing rampage.

Kate Lethbridge-Stewart (Jemma Redgrave playing Jessica Danforth) is no longer the Head of Scientific Research at UNIT and is now in charge of the free world. Grieving Special Agent Parker (Emmy Raver-Lampman) from the Boston FBI is given free rein to pursue her mother’s friend as he cleans up the sticky mess he has uncovered. Jeremy Irons perhaps puts too much effort into his part playing a retired CIA director turned security consultant for a family bees-ness.

While the leaking roof in the Boston FBI office is a great grim detail, nearly everything else about the film is implausible at every turn. A secret organisation relying on green-screen IBM computers and dot matrix printers? The action sequences involve people with bullet proof vests dropping like flies while one scammer suffers a different kind of stinging digital loss.

Jason Statham gives a masterclass in clasping his hands together and talking earnestly into space without any making eye contact with anyone else in the room. It’s a terrible device, but well acted. The second skate-boarding scene eventually justifies the first.

The Beekeeper has pun-ridden dialogue that makes characters wax lyrical with lines a Dalek might be expected to deliver. While the Bourne franchise served up plots that were full of shark-jumping, this lower division movie includes enough inventive moments of out of all proportion action to keep your interest.

The first 20 minutes of The Beekeeper should on the school digital literacy sylla-buzz and broadcast on TV as a warning for people to avoid falling for phishing attacks. There shouldn’t ever be a sequel. Which will save us from sequences using USB drives and frisbees to extract information from corrupt pollenticians or steal Pablo Bee-casso paintings.

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