Clay dispatches his adversaries with characteristic Statham aplomb, which, apologies to Nicole Kidman, is why we come to this place.

| Jan 19, 2024

Much of it is illogical, preposterous over-the-top ridiculous, which is what makes it such a guilty pleasure and one of Statham’s and Ayer’s best films.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 17, 2024

Off we go. Like, way off, leaving even the notion of reality behind like a burned-out barn full of busted honey jars. In its place, a hero who makes James Bond look inconspicuous and John Wick look vincible.

| Original Score: 0/5 | Jan 17, 2024

This wacky bit of action fun is wildly entertaining and zips by with the good-natured buzz of a bumblebee. If this is your kind of dumb-movie honey, it’s delectable.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 17, 2024

It’s Statham’s movie – a brisk, slick, ultra-violent action onslaught that yet again demonstrates his ability to redeem just about any old tosh.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 14, 2024

The shame is that there are flickers of greatness here. Statham, in action, is thunderously convincing. In character, he’s pleasingly ironic.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 12, 2024

The Beekeeper, which is both a bee movie and a B movie, falls in the same category as many other Statham-versus-everyone action thrillers: not very good, yet enjoyable enough.

| Jan 12, 2024

A sad disappointment for bee enthusiasts.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 12, 2024

David Ayer has made a special kind of folly this time: an imbecilic and inept pileup of action-movie clichés redeemed only by the occasional hilarity of its caveman excess.

| Original Score: 1.5/5 | Jan 12, 2024

Time and again he’s surrounded by hordes of SWAT guys, Secret Service agents, cops, mercenaries, you name it. And time and again they’re all laid low. It’s nuts. It’s funny.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 12, 2024

[Ayer] tackles this assignment without much self-seriousness but doesn’t seem keen to embrace its silliness quotient, either.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 12, 2024

The Beekeeper makes honey out of hooey.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 12, 2024

There’s a grubby, late-night appeal to [Ayer's] dialled-up trash aesthetic and The Beekeeper mostly works because of it.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 11, 2024

What starts out as Statham defending the downtrodden and the defenseless hard-working citizens who get robbed by 21st-century villains turns into something close to toxic tinfoil-hat ranting.

| Jan 11, 2024

As the movie’s renegade protagonist makes his way closer and closer to the White House, with blood and chaos in his wake, The Beekeeper begins to feel like an uncomfortable B-movie crosspollination of today’s conspiracy theory-marred political landscape.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 11, 2024

The Beekeeper is slick, dumb fun... There's plenty of honey here to go around.

| Original Score: B | Jan 11, 2024

Just absolute bee-movie trash.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 11, 2024

Glorifying endless violence as these films tend to do (fingers are severed, limbs are torn, cheeks are pierced, heads are blown), The Beekeeper is exactly what it appears to be. Nothing more, nothing less.

| Original Score: D | Jan 11, 2024

It appreciates the virtues of its leading man, who appears to have come by his muscles honestly, and does everything from dialogue to martial arts to gunplay as simply as possible.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 11, 2024

It does everything that an action movie needs to do and does it in witty, unexpected ways.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 11, 2024