A few minutes into David Ayer’s The Beekeeper, there’s a charming exchange between gruff retired secret agent Adam Clay (Jason Statham) and his landlady, sweet old lady Eloise Parker (Phylicia Rashad). After taking care of a hornet problem on her property, Clay earnestly mumbles, in his 75% British, 25% American accent, “I just want to thank you for putting up with me…and all my bees.” This exchange gave me the false hope that Ayer’s action-revenge yarn would focus quite heavily on literal bees – perhaps Clay, a beekeeper, can harness their power against his enemies – but unfortunately, most of the apian content in The Beekeeper is purely symbolic. What a missed opportunity.

It turns out that Clay, now a literal beekeeper, used to be a figurative Beekeeper – an elite, classified agent hired to “protect the hive” (the United States) from any threats, by any means necessary. He’s long since retired but liked the concept of beekeeping so much he chose to pursue it as a vocation, and has been living in an outbuilding on Eloise Parker’s rural Massachusetts property for some time. After Eloise is the victim of a callous tech scam that wipes out her bank accounts, Clay swears revenge, putting him on a direct collision course with bratty millennial nepo baby Derek Danforth (Josh Hutcherson) and his long-suffering minder, ex-head of the CIA Wallace Westwyld (Jeremy Irons).

There isn’t much else to say about The Beekeeper – if you’ve seen any of David Ayer’s films or screenwriter Kurt Wimmer’s (Expend4bles, Salt, Law Abiding Citizen) other work, you’ll anticipate the violent setpieces and ham-fisted dialogue. While the insidious scam phone call network plot pot is a timely enemy, it being presented as a millennial/Gen Z invention smacks of technophobic revisionism. The obligatory carousel of generic baddies thunder onto the screen one after the other to be swiftly dispatched by Statham, who keeps making gruff statements about “protecting the hive”, and it all seems to be leading to a blow-out battle that…never actually happens. After dispatching countless goons with guns, gasoline and one creative use of a truck, a bridge and a length of belt, the film’s big showdown is a letdown.

But the thing I keep coming back to is the bees. If you’re going to call a film The Beekeeper and centre it on a character who is both a literal beekeeper and a super spy with the codename beekeeper, the least you can do is incorporate bees or bee-related paraphernalia into the plot as more than a metaphor. Have your honey-loving hero knock a beehive onto someone’s head Looney Tunes-style, or use a smoker to flush out some goons from a building. Show him drowning someone in a vat of honey, or incorporating bee venom into his armoury. Have Clay make some offhand remark about how the decline of the honeybee is a sign of sure-fire environmental collapse. If you really want to go hell for leather, there’s the ancient practice of scaphism, which I learned about from Horrible Histories as a child and was mentally scarred by. All we get, after the initial bee-heavy introduction, is a scene where the bad guys shoot up Clay’s beloved apiary in retaliation for him burning down a call centre, which is a major cop-out.

The Beekeeper really could have been a film that sets itself apart from other action thrillers by giving us a hardman with a solid brand and an impressive level of job satisfaction. Instead, what we have is a generic addition to an already oversaturated genre – one that doesn’t even have the sense to make use of Statham’s often underutilised comedic talents.