Metacritic reviews

It's an action movie with plot beats that might make certain audience members raise their eyebrows and scoff, but it will have Statham devotees smiling, laughing, and cheering in their seats.

100% pure Statham, and after many years where audiences had to settle for the diluted variety it’s a welcome return to form.

By Cinema Stathama considerations, The Beekeeper is a masterpiece – the best B(ee)-movie of this cold-hearted season.

Statham, 56 and fit enough to bring the fury, benefits from impressive stuntwork — his own, his double’s and the legion of stunt men/minions he’s meant to stab, kick, punch and plow his way through. And everybody can toast the breathless editing from Geoffrey O’Brien, who should be on everybody involved’s Christmas card list after this.

The Beekeeper is an engaging ride, and once the action starts it never lets up.

A beat-‘em-up whose competent fight sequences are ultimately overshadowed by its unintentional humor.

What this movie has — courtesy of Kurt Wimmer’s upwardly mobile script — is a rickety ladder that it climbs from comically low stakes up to the highest levels of power.

Statham is as gruffly convincing as he usually is (though it’s 20 minutes before he’s even allowed to kick any ass), but the action scenes are horribly inconsistent: fine in the hand-to-hand stuff, sloppy elsewhere.

In The Beekeeper, as has been the case with pretty much anything Statham has done in the past half-decade, the actor is on hand to collect a paycheck in exchange for bringing a recognizable name to the proceedings.

It’s not unlike a partially completed sketch whose occasional flashes of color only serve to remind us how incomplete and lazily constructed the rest of it is.