Josh Hutcherson, Jeremy Irons and Phylicia Rashad also star in this body pileup orchestrated by a retired government killing machine taking down a massive phishing scam.

If you were concerned there wouldn’t be enough unsubtle apiculture metaphors for meting out justice via hellacious ass-whooping in The Beekeeper, you can relax. Even if director David Ayer remains in his usual mode of glowering self-seriousness, whenever Jason Statham snarls about “protecting the hive” or “smoking out the hornets” or “killing the queen,” you get an inkling of how much fun this violent revenge thriller might have been in more playful hands. Still, watching the bullet-headed action star take down squads of government agents and thuggish mercenaries alike, mostly while unarmed, is fun enough. Probably even more so in Imax.

Sure enough, Eloise is disconcerted when a hard-drive virus alert pops up on her laptop screen, prompting her to call a company identified as United Data Group. In short order, slick UDG dirtbag Garnett (David Witts) bilks the old lady out of her life savings, as well as a $2 million charity account she manages.

Take away the apiary element and these are basically the plot foundations of Blaga’s Lessons, Bulgaria’s submission in the 2024 Oscars’ international feature category. But where the title character in that social-realist thriller (also a retired schoolteacher) crosses over to the dark side and joins the criminal class, Eloise is less resourceful. She instantly admits defeat by shooting herself. Bye, Phylicia. It’s a noble sacrifice that someone had to make in order to set Jason Statham on a vendetta rampage.

On top of the guilt felt by Eloise’s FBI agent daughter Verona (Emmy Raver-Lampman) over her infrequent visits home, she’s aghast to learn the reason behind her mother’s suicide. The Bureau has been unsuccessfully trying to crack the phishing network for two years with no leads. But Adam locates UDG with one phone call to a tech specialist from his Beekeeper days, prompting him to neutralize the operation with some fist and foot action and a couple of containers of gasoline. It’s just as remarkably easy for Garnett and his muscle to track down Adam, though of course their payback doesn’t go as planned.

Adam’s trail of destruction ensures that the FBI team led by Verona and her partner Wiley (Bobby Naderi) are always on his tail, at the same time as the chain of command behind the data-mining scam comes into focus. Each of the many phishing centers answers to Derek Danforth (Josh Hutcherson), a douchey 28-year-old rich-kid cokehead who tools around his office on a skateboard in extraordinarily ugly outfits (that puke-green suit!) and bad highlights.

Once Derek figures out that Clay is coming for him, he decides the best way to protect himself is by sticking close to his mother and her extensive security detail. But the dumb script dictates that he do this in the most reckless way possible, showing up for a weekend at the stately mansion she refers to as “the beach house” and throwing a party there for his shady associates.

Will Adam prove a match for a heavily armed government security team, the FBI agents and the scuzzy goon squad hired by Westwyld? Do you even have to ask? The latter element is headed by Lazarus (Taylor James), a sneering brute who once took out a Beekeeper and lost a leg in the process. He spits out every line in a gnarly South African accent, because it wouldn’t be a David Ayer film without an obnoxious stereotype.

It’s been clear in most of his post-End of Watch directing gigs that Ayer has little use for actors beyond serving as magnets for explosive action. (Poor Minnie Driver doesn’t even get to do that, basically just taking one phone call as the CIA chief.) To that end, Ayer chose wisely in Statham, whose almost comical gravitas helps us buy it every time Adam’s limbs fly in different directions, knocking folks on both sides of the law out cold with minimal variation of his set-in-stone expression. He pauses long enough here and there to outline his moral code in speeches about the evils of stealing from defenseless old people, and he generally reserves his kills for the true wrongdoers.