David Ayer’s The Beekeeper is peak late Jason Statham – fun, exciting and totally committed to its ludicrous premise. One of the most enjoyable things about classical action cinema is its exposition, and Ayer leans into that deeply here, by way of the central (and title) premise of “beekeepers.” For Adam Clay, Statham’s character, is a beekeeper, a special operative trained within the system to operate beyond the system. When the film opens, Adam has retired, and is spending his silver years literally keeping bees, on the property of Eloise Parker (Phylicia Rashad), a retired high school teacher who manages a charity fund. We only see Eloise for a few brief scenes, however, since she takes her own life after her entire savings and that of her charity are scammed by a data company, leading Adam to go into full revenge mode. As the film proceeds, we travel with Adam up the rungs of this data enterprise, starting with the local branch that scammed Eloise, and moving through Derek Danforth (Josh Hutcherson), the general manager, Wallace Westwyld (Jeremy Irons), his supervisor, and eventually Derek’s mother (Jemma Redgrave), who also happens to be President of the United States.

Beyond a certain point, The Beekeeper consists largely of visceral action and dialogue about bees – and that works brilliantly. Ayer and screenwriter Kurt Wimmer draw out the beekeeping mythology as lovingly as the John Wick films expound upon the Continental, revelling in the inane pleasure of action cinema that takes its core concept to an absurd extreme. The dialogue moves through one great apiary aphorism after another, usually in the mouth of Adam, who’s continually referring to the hive, the swarm, the sting, the honey, and any other beekeeping analogy that comes to mind. As if that weren’t campy and shticky enough, Jeremy Irons sets out to match Statham’s energy, doubling down on his haughty-but-trashy British accent and overacting “Britishness” in every scene in which he appears, until the beekeeping concept and the English contingent here collapse into the same enjoyment.

That said, the sublime silliness of The Beekeeper doesn’t prevent it having something to say. Action movies tend to really thrive on visceral hatred, but it’s harder to generate that intensity now audiences are less inclined to vilify minority figures. Ayer and Wimmer therefore take it another way, setting their sights on corporate scammers as the root of all evil in American culture. The classical action hero always needs the impoverished beta male as his disavowed double too, and so in this case it takes the form of the crypto bro, or tech homie, personified in a wonderfully smarmy performance from Hutcherson. Likewise, the classical action hero usually finds himself unable to fully identify with the system he is ostensibly protecting. As a beekeeper, Adam is already in this position, but it’s enhanced by his discovery that Derek is the son of the President, whose campaign turned out to be financed by dodgy data mining. Hanging over The Beekeeper, then, is a shadowy confluence of politics, dynasty and technology, one driven primarily by a corrupt Trumpian network but with a Hillary-like figure presented as its figurehead, albeit eventually exonerated by ignorance of her son’s corruption. Between those Trumpian and Hillaryesque images, a paranoid vision of a new technocratic nation state emerges – one in which the President literally owns information.

In other words, The Beekeeper questions what it means to be outside the system, or whether this is even possible in any enduring manner. Some of the most memorable scenes in the film see Statham pitting the full intensity of his action physique against spaces that seem to elude physical conquest – especially those of Big Data, which here revolve around a series of “metaverse meth labs.” We’re used to seeing the thresholds of these spaces on news television and in documentaries (I was reminded especially of the way Michael Moore often sets himself up at the entrances to big corporate offices to interview anyone coming in or out) but here Statham traverses them in a wonderfully flamboyant and fantastical way. In that sense, the first action set piece is also the most memorable, as Adam responds to the warning of United Data Enterprises’ hired goons by returning with flamethrowers and fighting his way to the call centre on the top floor of the building, which he promptly and brutally eviscerates. The boss’ effort to bribe him with promises of endless crypto and NFTs goes unheeded, as Adam draws on the networked knowledge of beekeepers as the only bulwark against the network of illicit data mining. In response, the President has no option but to hire mercenaries, since only outsiders can defend this alien alterity at the heart of her power base.

Beekeeping, then, is more than just an enjoyable inane metaphor in Ayer’s film. Not only does it become a model for an alternative network of resistance, but Adam literally is a beekeeper. Having done his work as a government beekeeper, he retires to raise bees, and with that pursuit comes the film’s vision of action as artisanal labour, destined to die out with an older generation unless cinema makes a conscious attempt to revive it. There’s not really all that much difference between Adam and the older digital naives targeted by the data mining company, which imparts a certain comic energy to the action, but also explains why he is so viscerally invested in getting revenge: “Being old can be a lonely thing. At a certain age, you cease to exist.” As in the Equalizer films (and especially The Equalizer 3), action becomes an affirmation of old age, one of the few genres where a fully embodied vision of aging can be realised. And The Beekeeper is a remarkably embodied film, thanks in part to its mellifluous honeycomb palette, which aligns it with the classical western, figures cast in silhouette in all their bodily bluntness against American landscapes. Adam is lovingly bottling his honey right when Eloise realises the full extent of the scam, while his alibi is “I was bringing her a jar of honey.” When the government comes for his actual bees as well, things grow truly personal.

Still, it must be said that the third act of The Beekeeper doesn’t quite live up to its incredible premise. In a bit of a weak turn, it emerges that the President didn’t know that her campaign was funded with data mined cash, meaning that she emerges somewhat redeemed after her son takes a bullet, and even has a chance to do a bit of moralising of her own. Likewise, while the third act has some impressive action sequences, it never quite matches the primal ultra-violence of the first act – Adam and a pair of flamethrowers rocking up at the entrance to a United Data call centre. Even with that slight dropoff though, this is peak Jason Statham, and all the more so for the fact that it occurs later in his career, and is so invested in this lateness.