The Beekeeper ending explained

The Beekeeper sees Jason Statham wreaking all sorts of havoc in the name of justice – here’s a breakdown of exactly how the movie ends.

The new movie, directed by Fury and Suicide Squad’s David Ayer, follows Adam Clay (Statham), a quiet beekeeper who works on a large country estate for Eloise (Phylicia Rashad). One day, her laptop is “beeped” by a pop-up warning her of infectious malware.

She phones the number, and a happy-to-help operator picks up straight away. He offers to fix all of her problems remotely, that way she doesn’t need to lug her computer all the way into town. One blackout later, every penny in her digital possession is gone without a trace, and she can’t process the theft – so, she kills herself that same night.

The police are no use. The FBI don’t have any ideas. The CIA can’t trace the location of the caller. Don’t worry, because Statham isn’t just a Beekeeper – he’s a Beekeeper, and he’ll protect the hive no matter what it takes.

The Beekeeper ending explained

The Beekeeper ends with Clay assassinating the president’s son Derek (Josh Hutcherson) and escaping into the sea. Agent Verona Parker (Emmy Raver-Lampman) has him in her sights, but she lets him go, believing to stand for justice over the law.

Let’s get the Beekeepers out the way first: they’re an extra-governmental, super-secret agency that work outside the chain of command – even former CIA director Wallace Westwyld (Jeremy Irons) wasn’t privy to the details.

“The honeybee has always had a special relationship with humanity… a sacred relationship. Why? No bees, no agriculture. No agriculture, no civilization. Our nation is not unlike a beehive, with its complex systems of workers, caretakers, even royalty – if any of the beehive’s complex mechanisms are compromised, the hive collapses. Someone a long time ago decided that a mechanism was needed to keep our nation safe, a mechanism outside the chain of command, outside the system. Its one mission: to keep the system safe. Beekeepers are given all resources, empowered to act on their own judgement. For decades, they have quietly worked to keep the hive safe.

So, you could say they have a particular set of skills; in the words of Wallace, they make the world’s otherwise deadliest assassins look like “p*ssies.” Clay may be retired, but that makes him more dangerous – he’s even more unaccountable.

While the rest of America’s intelligence agencies struggle to find United Data Group, the first call center responsible for scamming Eloise, Clay’s pal locates it in what seems like a few minutes. He burns it to the ground and kills its head honcho before vowing to murder the head of the operation: Derek Danforth, a coke-snorting playboy printing (stolen) money from his call centers across the US.

Wallace is his stepfather, and as a favor to his mom, he calls an old CIA contact and asks her to try and get the Beekeepers’ help to take him out. They oblige, and a contract for Clay is quickly picked up by the current active operative, who also happens to be a “f**king lunatic.”

She confronts him at a gas station with a gatling gun, but he smashes her with a jar of honey and sets her alight. Soon after, he makes his way to Nine Star United in Boston, Derek’s most profitable phishing base. After a scrap with FBI guards stationed outside the building, he makes his way inside and dispatches the private security outfit (one gets lamped with a fire extinguisher, another gets cut in half by a plummeting lift).

Clay finds the “middle manager” and throws him through the center’s CPUs like Bam Margera in Drywall Drop-in, before stapling him until he gives up his boss. He shows him a photo of Derek, and warns that he’s “untouchable” – but in Clay’s eyes, “nobody is untouchable… sometimes when the hive is out of balance, you have to replace the queen.”

The Beekeeper’s twist is bonkers

MGM

What does he mean by that, I hear you ask? Well, it turns out Derek is the son of US President Danforth. He heads to her beach house for the weekend, which is completely surrounded by armed guards – but Clay manages to find a way in, latching onto a truck through a manhole cover, strangling a man checking there’s nothing dangerous in the undercarriage, and wearing his clothes as a disguise.

Confusingly, he then takes all that off to put on a rather dapper suit, before walking around the party in plain sight. He’s pursued by Verona and the other mercenaries, leading to him being surrounded in the garden. “To bee or not to bee, that’s the bloody question, eh?” one asks him, and he says, “I think I’ll take… to be” before blowing up the car behind him.

A chase ensues, with Clay making his way back into the house and mowing down everyone in his path to try and get to the president. He has one gnarly mano a mano fight with a mercenary, before barging into the president’s office. Moments prior, Derek confessed to stealing CIA software and teaching it to “hunt money, not terrorists”, and he even killed the deputy director in a moment of panic.

As Clay aims down his rifle at the president, Verona and her partner storm in and plead with him to not kill her. He obliges – and shoots Derek in the head instead before leaping out of the window. As he runs away, he turns back to see Verona aiming at him with her gun – but she stands down to let him flee, and before any of the guards make it to the beach, he’s already vanished into the water.

The Beekeeper is in cinemas now. You can find out how to watch it here, and read our review here.