Watch the trailer on YouTube: https://youtu.be/WfZMdt00kEs
When Sherlock Holmes retired, he went off to the Sussex Downs to keep bees and write a practical handbook on the subject. Nobody came to his cottage with a flamethrower. Adam Clay has not been so lucky. The man who spent an entire film insisting he was merely a humble apiarist, while working his way through a call centre, the FBI and most of the Washington establishment, is back in the first trailer for The Beekeeper 2, and his retirement plans remain as unconvincing as ever.
Jason Statham returns as Clay, now a wanted man. The problem this time is an internal one. The Beekeepers, the shadowy organisation that trained him and which appears on no government flowchart anybody would admit to drawing, have gone rogue and set their sights on President Jessica Danforth, played once again by Jemma Redgrave. Clay, naturally, is the only man who can stop them. Quis custodiet ipsos apiarios, as Juvenal would surely have put it had he spent more time around hives.
Doctor Who fans will know Redgrave as UNIT’s Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, so she has plenty of experience of standing behind armed men while something unspeakable happens nearby. The novelty here is that the unspeakable thing is her own security apparatus.
The rogue-agency plot is one of spy-fi’s oldest standbys. Ethan Hunt has been disavowed so often he probably keeps the paperwork in a drawer. And the Beekeeper films have always sat closer to an ITC adventure series than to anything by le Carré: a secret department with a gloriously daft name, a hero with an impenetrable job title, and a plot that escalates from local mischief to the leader of the free world in roughly the time it takes to brew a pot of tea. Marvel readers, meanwhile, may note that the henchmen of Advanced Idea Mechanics have been shuffling about in yellow suits that look suspiciously like beekeeping gear since the sixties. AIM clearly missed a trick on the branding.
The biggest change is behind the camera. David Ayer has handed over to Timo Tjahjanto, the Indonesian director of May the Devil Take You, The Night Comes for Us, The Shadow Strays and Nobody 2. Anybody who has sat through The Night Comes for Us will know Tjahjanto regards the human body less as a vessel for drama and more as a quarry to be worked. Pair him with Statham, a man who has never knowingly under-thumped anyone, and the result was never going to be a chamber piece. The script comes from Umair Aleem (Kate), with original Beekeeper writer Kurt Wimmer also involved; Wimmer being the man who gave the world Equilibrium and its gun kata, so subtlety was presumably not on the shopping list.
As for the trailer itself, it is brief and does not waste its time on nuance. There is Metallica on the soundtrack. There are flamethrowers. There is a 1969 Dodge with a minigun bolted to it, which is not, strictly speaking, standard apiary equipment. Footage shown to cinema owners at CinemaCon back in April reportedly went further still, with Clay using bee stings to slow his own bleeding and a sequence involving bees being used to see off the opposition. Not since Irwin Allen’s The Swarm in 1978, in which Michael Caine spent a great deal of time staring at insects with the expression of a man re-reading his contract, have bees been asked to carry quite so much of a film.
Jeremy Irons is back as Wallace Westwyld, the former CIA director who delivers exposition with the grave melancholy of somebody reading the shipping forecast at a gunfight, and Emmy Raver-Lampman and Bobby Naderi return too. New arrivals include Yara Shahidi, Pom Klementieff, who brings fresh espionage credentials from her stint trying to kill Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible, and Adam Copeland, better known to wrestling fans as Edge and to younger viewers as Ares in Percy Jackson. That is a cast which looks capable of taking punches and, in Irons’s case, of looking faintly disappointed that anybody is throwing them.
The commercial logic here needs no explaining. The first film was made for around $40 million and brought in more than $160 million worldwide, which in Hollywood maths turns a modest revenge thriller into a franchise awaiting further exploitation. Here at SFcrowsnest we have no objection to that whatsoever, provided the bees keep getting top billing.
The Beekeeper 2 opens in US cinemas on 15 January 2027, through Amazon MGM Studios, returning to the same mid-January slot that served the original so well. January was once where studios quietly buried their mistakes. It is now, apparently, Jason Statham’s personal allotment.
Holmes never needed a minigun, of course. Then again, his bees never formed a breakaway faction and kidnapped the Prime Minister.
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