The Beekeeper

Jason Statham raises bees and kicks butts in his latest brain-dead actioner playing the lone man out to do some good.

I’m not a big fan of Jason Statham or the kinds of movies he makes, which I’d describe as lone-man violence fetishism. It’s the sort of stuff Arnold Schwarzenegger made early in his career before he acquired a sense of humor. There’s little levity in “The Beekeeper,” Statham’s latest actioner, which is certainly one of the dumbest movies I’ve seen in awhile.

Let me bounce this premise off you: Statham is Adam Clay, a nobody who raises bees for their honey. But when some young Internet financial bandits do bad things to his neighbor, Clay goes on a one-man revenge spree. Bodies will pile up and buildings will be burned down.

Turns out he used to be a member of a super-secret club of agents called the Beekeepers. Their job was to operate outside the law to fix stuff when leaders let things go too far. Clay decides he needs to come out of retirement and protect the hive — even if that means taking out the queen herself if she’s producing defective offspring.

Pressing the analogy further, the main villain is Derek Danforth, an annoying little twerp played by Josh Hutcherson who runs a bunch of scam call centers where they bilk computer illiterate old people out of their money. Turns out his mother is very powerful — I won’t say exactly how, but let your imagination wander to the highest and most ridiculous conclusion.

So you’ve got Clay running around killing people, increasing numbers of cops and black-ops types chasing him, the suits in the corridors of power growing increasingly tremulous, and all the while everyone’s shouting, “But he’s just a BEEKEEPER!!”

This theme of the anonymous guy living alongside us who’s secretly the ultimate killing machine has become pretty ubiquitous in recent years: the “John Wick” flicks, “Nobody,” “The Accountant,” etc.

What’s next? “The Optometrist?” Murderous marketing gurus? CEO by day, CIA at night? Killer kindergarten teachers?

(No, wait, we already did that one…)

I could see a way this material could work if it was a satirical send-up of those other movies. For God’s sake, the beekeeper?? But no, director David Ayer, who once made the excellent “End of Watch,” and screenwriter Kurt Wimmer play this material straight, like a tone-deaf singer who keeps warbling at the top of their voice.

Honestly, there’s a part of me that thinks this screenplay could’ve been written by A.I. It’s the only way some of its silliest elements could make sense, like the attitudinal F.B.I. agent (Emmy Raver-Lampman) who is tailing Clay from the outset but comes to understand what he’s doing. She even comes with her own beta male sidekick (Bobby Naderi) who, every time he gets into a scrape, essentially melts and pleads that he’s got four kids.

Another nonsensical ingredient: Clay saves one jar of honey after his beekeeping operation is wrecked in a reprisal. He keeps carrying this thing around with him, which has some sort of coded lettering on it, and we expect it’ll prove important at some point. But no, the movie eventually just forgets about it.

Things will also suddenly get quite bizarre, with weird people with neon-colored hair and wearing animal prints showing up — it’s like a punk rock band invaded the movie. There’s a mohawked woman who’s supposed to be another beekeeper. Even weirder is a huge South African cyborg guy who keeps braying and bragging that he once killed a beekeeper.

These folks exist alongside staid figures like Jeremy Irons and Minnie Driver playing important government honchos working the puppet strings against Clay. Watching Oscar-nominated and -winning actors perambulate through this dreck makes me feel embarrassed for them.

Phylicia Rashad also turns up as Clay’s neighbor and friend, a kindly retired schoolteacher who gets all her money siphoned off by by the United Data Group, one of Danforth’s crews, setting off the spree.

I suppose the action scenes are decently staged, with Clay notably eschewing weapons of any kind, excepting those he disarms from those attacking him. Statham, who’s not a very big guy, swerves through these scenes like a plodding robot, moving his body as little as possible to take out hordes of other guys, his facial expression showing even less motion.

“The Beekeeper” is rockheaded garbage that at least seems aware that it’s garbage. January is the doldrums of moviegoing, when studios release their bottom-of-the-barrel stuff since there isn’t much for it to compete against. Don’t get stung.