In David Ayer's new film Phylicia Rashad plays a nice senior citizen, a retired teacher who has spent her life doing nothing but good works, who falls for a scam when her laptop is hacked. Soon enough she finds herself on the phone to a slimy millennial who smoothly coaxes access to her laptop and all her passwords out of her, and proceeds to empty her bank accounts, insurance policies, and even the fund of a charity for which she is a trustee. The fact that this sequence is written rather melodramatically doesn't detract from its effectiveness in making you want to see severe retribution visited upon the scammers, especially after Rashad tops herself in a fit of despair after losing everything. Fortunately, she is renting her barn to a quiet man with a somewhat obscure past, who has a baldy head and an accent bordering on the indescribable.

Yes, let joy be unconfined, it's a proper Jason Statham film! Which shouldn't be such a big deal, really, considering we had three of them in the space of six months last year – but all of those were sequels, two of them were ensemble films, in one of them J-Stat had little more than a cameo, one of them found our man out of his comfort zone in family-friendly territory, and the other was just rotten. With the new one, The Beekeeper, Mr Statham is back making the kind of film which for many years was the bedrock of his career.

As is traditional, the Jason Statham Character is a man with a mysterious past (and accent) who nowadays is living a quiet life and minding his own business. Until something happens to outrage his deeply-held code of honour and propel him back into the life of extreme violence and spectacular carnage he was previously on a break from. In The Beekeeper, the trigger moment comes when he comes across his landlady's corpse, and (as soon as the police are finished questioning him) virtually the first thing he does is track down the location of the scammers' office (which, conveniently, is within easy driving distance), beat up the security guards there and burn the building down.

This initially looks like a standard-issue, albeit very slickly produced, vigilante revenge fantasy – Rashad's daughter is an FBI agent (played by Emmy Raver-Lampman) who finds herself conflicted by her obligation to stop J-Stat's roaring rampage of vengeance, and her understandable desire to see the scumbags responsible for the death of her mum get what's coming to them, and there's a predictable degree of escalation – the bad guys track Statham down after he torches their office and carry out a drive-by shooting on his bee hives (he is literally a beekeeper), leading to a bit with him cornering them in his barn with some power tools.

However, very pleasingly, the film soon spirals off into the sort of bizarre realm that many of the best Statham films occupy. It turns out that Statham isn't just a beekeeper because he likes bees, he's also a retired member of an ultra-top-secret government programme called the Beekeepers, in which the most terrifyingly deadly people in the world are essentially given a roving brief to protect society however they see fit, with no oversight and not much accountability. This is sub-sub-comic book plotting, but this film was never going to be terribly plausible and it does enable the rest of the plot, in which Statham's pursuit of the people truly responsible for Rashad's death leads him to uncovering political corruption on a massive scale, with huge amounts of money involved and the trail leading to the highest levels of American society.

(One wonders if Jason Statham was hired as a Beekeeper because he already liked bees and showed potential when it came to hitting people, or if his primary skill was in thumping folks and he just took up apiculture as part of his cover. Possibly it's just a massive coincidence. Certainly there's another Beekeeper operative in the movie and they just seem to be a homicidal lunatic.)

If the plotting is sub-sub-comic book, the rest of it is largely just comic book stuff, and so therefore presumably an improvement. Ayer is too good a director to let things just get silly, however, and the film retains a pleasing level of wit and grittiness throughout. He even manages to coax a relatively nuanced performance out of Mr Statham – this is really a more extreme version of the standard Jason Statham Character, in that he almost comes across as an obsessively unhinged nutcase – but the film is not short on good performances. Josh Hutcherson is a hissably slimy villain, while lending proceedings unexpected heft are Jeremy Irons and Jemma Redgrave.

The film is somewhat generous to Mr Statham, in that the APB the police put out on him suggests he is '40-50 years old' – nevertheless, he is still representing one of the older generations, while most of the wrongdoers he is after are considerably younger. The film leans into this – he feels like an analogue kind of hero dealing with evils perpetrated by the digital generation. He doesn't look or act smooth, he may be a borderline violent psycho, but he's an authentic borderline violent psycho. They don't labour this element of generational conflict, but it's certainly present in the film (even if it still seems too early to suggest Statham is on the verge of making bus-pass bad-ass films).

The Beekeeper's other piece of curious subtext is really the only thing that gives me pause about the film. It really feels like there's a degree of coding here – the film features a female president, who's not as clued up about her family as she should be, and corruption close to the White House – that seems intended to make the film chime agreeably with the beliefs of the kind of old-school filmgoer who thinks a cute red baseball cap with a slogan on it is a great fashion accessory, and wouldn't find anything problematic in voting for a head of state who was facing 90+ felony charges. Encouraging this sort of thing, even tangentially, probably isn't a good idea – but then again, this is still technically a vigilante melodrama, and you could say the same about many, perhaps most of the films in this genre.

Anyway, this is only a bien-pensant issue with what's a very effective and entertaining thriller. After a bit of a dud year for Jason Statham and those of us who follow him, it's a welcome return to form in several ways, and hopefully a good indicator of what he's got in the pipeline. The Beekeeper is a Statham movie from near the top of the pile.

Also Showing. . .

. . . no bees, but much more likely to generate awards buzz: Yorgos Lanthimos' Poor Things must be art, as it contains lashings of borderline filth but the proper critics still seem to like it. This is the year's first riff on the Frankenstein legend, with Emma Stone playing the product of a slightly unsavoury experiment carried out by a Victorian mad scientist (Willem Dafoe with a face like a meat jigsaw). His plans for her are scuppered when she is whisked off for a grand tour of Europe by Mark Ruffalo's caddish lawyer, but possibly Ruffalo has taken on more than he can handle. . .

It's self-consciously quirky but it looks great, and Stone's performance is genuinely terrific – even if this seems to be getting overshadowed by people queueing up to say how 'brave' and 'vanity free' it is (this is usually commentator-code for 'actress doesn't wear make-up/takes clothes off'). The film's feminist credentials are possibly a little questionable, but it's certainly different, intelligent, and very well-made. It also contains larger quantities of graphic simulated sex than any other respectable movie I can remember.

. . . pitching to be this year's leading British true-story quality drama is James Hawes' One Life. Johnny Flynn plays Nicholas Winton, a young stockbroker who goes to Czechoslovakia in 1938 and finds himself overseeing the evacuation of hundreds of child refugees fleeing the expanding Nazi sphere of influence. Anthony Hopkins plays the older Winton fifty years later, when the story finally becomes widely-known. Helena Bonham Carter plays the younger Winton's mum and Samantha Spiro briefly pops up as Esther Rantzen.

You do kind of get the sense that the whole present-day bit with Hopkins is just here so they can recreate the famous moment when the outwardly unsentimental Winton is ambushed on live TV by dozens of the now-grown children whose lives he saved, but Hopkins is as solid as ever and the material in the thirties with Flynn is excellent, involving and profoundly moving. There's not much going on here that you don't see in a lot of British movies but this one is unusually effective in provoking an emotional response. A powerful and timely reminder of less-shameful days for Britain and its people.

Awix

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