Jason Statham a mild-mannered apiarist? Oh do beehive!
THERE’S unlikely to be any awards buzz about The Beekeeper (15A, 105 mins, ★★☆☆☆), a monumentally silly action thriller starring Jason Statham as Adam Clay, the apiarist of the title. Confusingly, he lovingly tends his hives having retired from a shadowy special ops team known as... the Beekeepers. It’s almost as if he’s too dim to realise that he’s allowed another hobby.
Anyway, Clay gets sucked back into crime-fighting when a kindly neighbour takes her own life after being scammed by a ruthless cyber-gang.
He duly bombs their office but gradually finds, to mix invertebrate metaphors, that he has opened up a can of worms. Yes, there’s a nasty conspiracy going on that leads all the way to Jeremy Irons and Jemma Redgrave, respectively playing the former director of the CIA and the President of the United States.
What all this means, of course, is a thunderously violent one-man killing spree in which Clay deploys guns, knives, fists, bombs and even petrol pumps to see off a battalion of baddies, none of whom ever work out that it makes sense to tackle a virtuoso exterminator as a swarm, not one by one.
The director is David Ayer, who has made some good films (Fury, Suicide Squad), but this one is summed up by the most hilariously bad line of the year so far: ‘Who the f*** are you, Winnie-the-Pooh!?’
Lift (12, 104 mins, ★★☆☆☆) isn’t much better. It’s a daft heist thriller in which Kevin Hart plays an international art thief almost as unconvincingly as the usually reliable Gugu Mbatha-Raw plays the Interpol cop on his tail (who then recruits him to steal a cargo of gold from a more menacing villain).
Director F. Gary Gray was also responsible for the 2003 remake of The Italian Job, which tells you all you need to know.
■ The Beekeeper is in cinemas now and on Sky Cinema later this year. Lift is on Netflix.