Watching Jason Statham burn, blow up, maim and kill online scammers when not tending to beehives

Reviewing a TV is a great excuse to watch some... err, not very high-brow movies. OK, action movies then. There's a popular genre of loner men, usually with pale skin, who've been kicked about in life and suffer it quietly. Until one day they reach breaking point. When they do, it's violent mayhem for those who stand in their way. Think Sisu and the John Wick movies.

Actually, almost any Liam Neeson film, and who can forget D-FENS played by Michael Douglas in Falling Down? Yes yes; enough of that "before my time" commentary. Jake Gyllenhaal in Road House then.

Smiles are rare in those movies, at least from main characters. Jason Statham in The Beekeeper on Amazon Prime Video being a case in point. Like Keanu Reeves in John Wick, The Beekeeper who Statham plays is not amused. By anything much. The Beekeeper is not a Guy Ritchie movie, unfortunately, so if you watch it, don't expect too much in terms of an intriguing plot with unexpected twists.

I thought it was curious as it's about Jase going to town, and rather brutally so, on online scammers.

In that sense, it's a very 2024 movie. Annoyingly, Prime Video displays it in 1080p only, and not 4K ultra-high definition and high dynamic range so it wasn't quite right for evaluating the TV in question. Well, the scaling was fine and the movie looked good on the 4K screen so there's that.

How realistic was it? The scam in The Beekeeper is the tech support one. A big flashing interstitial tells the victims something bad, a virus, has taken over their computers so call this number to sort it out. Non-techie users do what the computer tells them, and are persuaded into installing Remote Access Tools - RATs - by the scammers. 

Once a RAT is installed, the scammers engage in more social engineering to get the victims to log into their online banking and boom, their accounts are cleaned out and their credit cards are maxed out. In a matter of seconds, which is a bit yehnah oversimplified, and with biometric monitoring by banks, not quite that easy.

Jase finds out that his friend's been scammed that way, which is when the entertainment starts. That's the graphic violence against the scammers, who are portrayed as sitting in large call centres in the United States, whooping and trash-talking as they defraud victims. No sympathy for the unrepentant scammers in the call centre there!

Then the movie veers into anti-tech bro sentiment, and paranoia against the authorities along with the US President who has become accidentally corrupt. She is played by Jemma of the Redgrave acting dynasty, so along with David Witts from EastEnders, who plays a loudmouth baddie, there's strong British representation in The Beekeeper. Even Jeremy Irons (yes, he's in the movie too) gets roughed up by Jase.

The bit that could've made the movie more interesting is the mention of large scale data harvesting software developed by the CIA (of course!). This is used not by the CIA but the scammers who've purloined it, to find a large amount of victims.

And, the police can do nothing about it, because the law sucks but good old Jason? You bet he can, and he does, very very violently so.

Amazingly, that's all fine with the FBI led by agent Verona Parker (Emily Raver-Lampman), and the cack-handed Secret Service. Then Jason who ends up getting quite smashed up (this is always necessary in these movies) wins the fights, shoots the tech bro and dives off into the... well not sunset but into the water, bleeding from stab wounds and swims off.

That's where The Beekeeper misses a lot of tricks. There's heaps of money to be made out of scamming and crypto fraud (unfortunately), and online criminals are violent with one another to get their hands on cash and digital wallets. I will say no more but am happy to further develop a movie script along those lines so by all means, contact me for more details.

I can't get the time and life that I spent on The Beekeeper back, but watch the movie if you feel like it. I'll leave it to you to figure out the very tenuous bee connection. Oh, the honey making scenes seemed authentic and the bastards who shot up Jason's hives really got their comeuppances.