Both The Beekeeper director David Ayer and star Josh Hutcherson agree with the idea that a Jason Statham movie is, in essence, a category of film unto itself. “When you go to see a Jason Statham movie, you expect to see things done that no other human could get away with,” is how Hutcherson puts it. “There’s something about his confidence and his acting and his physicality — you believe that he can pull this off. And so that is a bit of a subgenre, for sure.”
Ayer agrees, telling Consequence that “I’ve always been an incredible fan of his work. I love what he does. There’s something about him that’s really iconic and specific, that the audience connects with.”
In The Beekeeper, Statham plays Adam Clay, a retired elite operative living a quiet life tending beehives. Until, that is, his neighbor and friend Eloise (Phylicia Rashad) dies by suicide, following a brutal hacking of her finances that drains all of her accounts. Turns out, that hacking scheme is just the tip of a vast criminal conspiracy, overseen by the squirrely and ruthless Derek Danforth (Hutcherson), and Adam’s determined to bring it down with brute force.
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Statham was already attached to star in The Beekeeper when Ayer received the script by Kurt Wimmer (Expend4bles, Equilibrium); while Ayer’s no stranger to action thanks to projects like End of Watch and 2016’s Suicide Squad, The Beekeeper being very much a Jason Statham movie was something, Ayer feels, that made it “really different from anything I’ve ever done.”
However, he adds, “I’ve always kind of wanted to do a more escapist, fun, pop action thing. [The Beekeeper] had all those elements, and then it had something you normally don’t see in these action movies, which is a really cool mythology about the beekeepers and beekeeping. It snapped in — like, I read the script and I could see it. I knew how to make that movie, and I wanted to make that movie.”
When asked what elements might define a Statham movie, Ayer’s first answer is immediate: “Jason punching people.” He says it with a laugh, but it’s not really a joke, because “there’s something about how he fights, how he looks on camera. There’s something about his presence that really enables people to project themselves into that character.”
