Film / The Beekeeper

"This is much bigger than a little phishing scam."

"I protect the hive. When the system is out of balance, I correct it."

— Mr. Clay

The Beekeeper is a 2024 action thriller film written by Kurt Wimmer (Equilibrium, Ultraviolet) and directed by David Ayer. It stars Jason Statham, Emmy Raver-Lampman, Josh Hutcherson, Bobby Naderi, Minnie Driver, Phylicia Rashad, and Jeremy Irons.

Statham plays Mr. Clay, an unassuming beekeeper whose close friend and landlord (Rashad) is driven to suicide after being caught in a malicious phishing scam. What the scammers do not know is that for Clay, beekeeping doesn’t just mean collecting honey - it means he’s a former member of a covert organization working outside the chain of command seeking to protect the innocent. Clay soon sets off on a path of revenge against the scammers that threatens to expose a conspiracy reaching to the highest corporate and governmental levels. The film was released January 12, 2024.

Previews: Restricted Trailer

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Tropes featured in The Beekeeper include:

• The Ace: The Beekeepers are already considered incredibly difficult to fight, with the sole person who successfully killed one losing his leg in a fight he acknowledges he won only by luck. Now, consider that Clay is considered to be leagues above them. And he proves it by pretty effortlessly killing the Beekeeper sent after him.
• Accentuate the Negative: Westwyld in a nutshell, Adam sees through his faux sympathies when they confront each other over his lament of innocence. Clay cites that Wallace had traded his gig for a better, more well paying job due to him caring more about prestige than he gives two shits about right & wrong.
• Advertising by Association: The trailer bills the film as being from the director of Suicide Squad and Fury.
• Affably Evil: Westwyld is friendly and charming as only Jeremy Irons can be.
• Agent Peacock: Lazarus, the loudmouth, gaudily dressed mercenary captain seems like just another Elite Mook for Clay to dispatch on his final rampage, but is the only one in the whole movie to give Clay a fight on near-equal terms despite having already been shot through his cheek, even managing to stab him in the fight.
• Ain't Too Proud to Beg: Garnett is most guilty of this, breaking down into Inelegant Blubbering when he gets four of five fingers on his right hand gashed off by Adam, after the idiot Yes-Man confronted him for torching his con job operation over what was taken from Eloise Parker. He again suffers a massive Villainous Breakdown of tearful whimpering, when he's strapped down with a bonding latch and driven along by Clay's truck into the east river.
• Alliterative Name: Wallace Westwyld and Derek Danforth.
• Always Someone Better: During a briefing with his elite operatives, Westwyld makes it clear that Clay outmatches each of them by leagues and that their only real chance against him is superior numbers. Clay also proves to be more than a match for his successor in the Beekeeper organisation.
• Animal Motifs: Bees, of course. Clay keeps bees for a living, repeatedly refers to his actions as protecting his hive, and makes liberal use of bee-related terminology.
• Anti-Villain: Westwyld is only protecting Derek out of devotion to his mother, and makes it clear he doesn't approve of Derek's massive phishing scam. He still does his best to protect him from Clay to prevent Jessica from losing her son, despite hating him for what a loathsome Spoiled Brat he is. He winds up being the only member of the conspiracy Clay spares (apart from a broken finger), since he only attempts to talk Clay down and at worst is a nuisance.
• An Arm and a Leg: The only person known to have killed a Beekeeper lost a leg in the process. In a brutal move, Clay gains the upper hand on the man by kicking his replacement false leg off when they fight.
• Artistic License – Law: Verona should not have been working the literal day after her mother's suicide, and should absolutely not have been touching a case involving the people who scammed said mother and triggered said suicide with a ten-foot pole, as it is a colossal conflict of interest.
• Asshole Victim:
  • Mickey Garnett, the head of the call center that gleefully scammed Eloise, meets his end when Clay straps him to a truck and drives it off a bridge, taking Mickey with it.
  • Derek Danforth is responsible for hacking CIA software to steal money from people he felt nobody would care about to finance his mother's presidential campaign without her knowledge. In the end, basically nobody cares enough about Derek to save his life directly. Save for his mother, who can be seen crying and shrieking her son's name as she's escorted off the premises.
• At Least I Admit It: Verona is an unrepentant douche at her core and does very little to pretend being anything else otherwise throughout the movie.
• Ax-Crazy: Anisette, the Beekeeper that fights Clay, is an absolute loon. She rear-ends his old semi-truck before shooting up most of the petrol station to get at him, happily guns down civilians and responding police officers (in sharp contrast to Clay's non-lethal (to an extent) incapacitation of such men throughout the film) and, when he proves tougher than anticipated, shreds the rest of the petrol station with a minigun.
• Beauty Is Bad: Derek Danforth may have the handsome boyish looks of Josh Hutcherson that his mother the President of the United States acknowledges, but he is a Psychopathic Manchild who shows no remorse for the countless lives he ruined for his own personal gain and desperately tries to run away from the consequences of his actions. Even his own mother is not safe from him whom he tries to use as a body shield to stop Clay from coming after him only to try and kill her when it is clear he won't relent.
• Because You Were Nice to Me: Clay notes that Eloise was basically just the only person he ever knew who tried to take care of him. She was a kind and aspiringly gentle soul whom only ever lived for the sake of helping others. Thus inspiring him to go to significant lengths to avenge her death.
• Benevolent Boss: Derek is extremely laid back when it comes to his direct employees, offering to give them vacation for jobs well done and partying with them. It would be redeeming if it wasn't all paid with money scammed from vulnerable people he is spending.
• Berserk Button: Discussed by Clay. Being close with Eloise was a big part of Clay's revenge and pursuit of justice for her, but Clay makes it clear that elder abuse is a MASSIVE one for him given how isolated and alone many elderly people are.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Clay is socially awkward but soft-spoken and polite to anyone uninvolved in Derek's scheme. He's still a dangerously ruthless and brutal combatant.
• Black-and-Grey Morality: Clay and Verona aren't particularly nice people, but the villains are (with the exception of Westwyld) one-dimensionally evil Smug Snakes who Kick the Dog with impunity.
• Boom, Headshot!: Clay takes out Derek this way in the climax.
• Borrowed Biometric Bypass: Clay cuts off the finger of a fellow Beekeeper so he can access the safehouse requiring a fingerprint ID.
• Brainless Beauty: An allusion to Jessica's earlier religious quip, she'd likened Derek to being beautiful but he has shown to be conceited and meanspirited as he is none too bright. His overconfidence and general pettiness lands him in the crosshairs of an illustrious covert agent after his datamining con inadvertently killed his only real friend. That's certainly one way to torpedo your own side-business, even Westwyld mentioned how he'd found new and extravagant means of royally lousing everything up.
• CIA Evil, FBI Good: Downplayed but the FBI is generally seen trying to uphold the law and bring in the bad guys whereas Westwyld, one of Danforth’s top advisors, is a former CIA director and isn’t above reaching out to his old contacts in the organization to put a hit out on Clay.
• Cluster F-Bomb: The film has the f-word used over a 100 times. If anything, almost every time Derek spoke, he said the word "fuck."
• "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: Derek gets this this quite a few times from most everyone in his life for what his scamming firm did. Even the flamboyant merc, Lazarus called him out for being a douche on it. Not for internet con jobs mind you, but for grabbing the wrong kind of attention and severely underestimating the blowback from it.
• Combat Pragmatist: Clay kicking off Lazarus' prosthetic leg, depriving Lazarus of the leverage he needs to keep up with Clay.
• The Conspiracy: A mix of Corporate Conspiracy and Government Conspiracy. While his revenge on Eloise's scammers is swift and brutal, Clay recognizes the scammer's efforts as more than a mere phishing operation. It soon comes to light that everything was arranged by Derek Danforth, who used a network of these call centers and targeting software from the CIA to con vulnerable people out of their earnings to finance his mother's presidential campaign. Bribing her a path to victory, unusually, she's not in on it at all.
• Conservation of Ninjutsu: Clay tears through armies of opponents with barely a step missed, the only fights which seem to give him any degree of difficulty are one-on-one confrontations with Lazarus, the leader of Derek Danforth's mercenaries and Anisette, an Ax-Crazy member of the Beekeepers.
• The Corpse Stops Here: Downplayed. When Clay discovers Eloise's corpse, he is quickly taken in for questioning by the FBI. However, they let him go when they turn up no evidence of any wrongdoing on his part.
• Corrupted Character Copy: Amazingly, Derek is one to Iosef Tarasov from John Wick. They're both the spoiled, arrogant son of a powerful figure who sets off the unstoppable protagonist's Roaring Rampage of Revenge by killing one of their loved ones (in Derek's case indirectly). But for as evil as Iosef was, he never ruined as many lives as Derek did, nor did he stoop so low as to try and murder his own parental figure.
• Credits Gag: Every instance of the letter "O" in the opening credits is shaped like the hexagon of a honeycomb.
• Determinator: Clay is willing to go to any lengths to punish the people responsible for Eloise's suicide. Up to and including going after the President of the United States of America, though he ultimately spares her.
• Dirty Coward: The scammer leader doesn’t confront Clay directly; instead he has his men attempt to fight him. His boss Derek goes even further, explicitly hiding in his mother's vicinity because he thinks no-one would try to attack the President of the United States.
• Disc-One Final Boss: After a request from the CIA, Anisette, the current active Beekeeper, is dispatched to take out Clay. He kills her in short order and her superiors resolve to remain neutral for the rest of the conflict.
• The Dragon: Westwyld, a former head of the CIA, is this for Derek. Unusually for this trope, he can't stand Derek and only tries to keep him safe out of devotion to his mother. While Clay breaks his fingers in the finale, he lets him live.
• The Dreaded: The Beekeepers, to anyone who is aware of their existence. The first reaction of anyone who knows about Beekeepers to finding out Derek antagonized one is to panic, bluntly stating that the man signed his own death warrant.
• Driven to Suicide: Eloise Parker shoots herself in the head after losing two million dollars for a charity she helped run (as well as her life savings) to online scammers.
• Drowning My Sorrows: Verona gets wasted after discovering her mother's suicide.
• Elevator Failure: Clay uses a charge to blow the cable holding an elevator up after luring a bunch of mooks into it. For added effectiveness, he's also strung up a bunch of Kevlar wire near the door, so even the mooks who do manage to fumble out when they realize what he's doing still get dragged to their deaths.
• Elder Abuse: The film kicks off with the elderly Eloise Parker being robbed of over $2 million using a phishing scam. It's used to show how vile the antagonists are, and drives Clay's vendetta against them, both because of his personal connection to her and the particular cruelty of targeting the most vulnerable in society.
• Elites Are More Glamorous: Subverted. Westwyld identifies a group of his special forces operatives, Navy SEALs and Delta Force men alike, as "pussies" compared to a Beekeeper.
• Even Evil Can Be Loved: Sociopathic, drug-addled scumbag Derek may be, but President Danforth is horrified at his death, and sounds like she's having a breakdown as Clay escapes.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Subverted. Derek used the ill-gotten gains from his cyberscams to finance his mother's presidential campaign, but when he is finally cornered he threatens to murder his own mother and holds her as a hostage so Clay won't kill him, and nearly goes through with it when it becomes clear Clay isn't going to stop.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • Notably, Clay never kills anyone who's just trying to protect the Danforths because they're doing their jobs, whether they be police, FBI or Secret Service, doing enough to take them out of the immediate fight without inflicting fatal injuries. By contrast, he has no problem delivering fatal damage to people who were directly employed by Danforth and his associates.
  • Clay also never kills any of Derek's henchmen unless they try to kill him first. He was perfectly willing to leave Garnett alone until he tried to kill him, and he spares Westwyld and most of the scammers despite them being loyal to Derek.
  • While Wallace Westwyld is active in trying to get his old CIA friends to track down and kill Clay, he's appalled when he hears the current Beekeeper will be sent after him, regarding her as a psychopath that should have been put out to pasture long before.
• Evil Counterpart: At one point, another Beekeeper is dispatched to try and kill Clay, with this Beekeeper being described as a psychopath who should have been retired years ago. To top it off, compared to Clay's sophisticated personality and being a Badass In A Suit, most of the villainous Beekeepers are chaotic and dress up like they're Cyberpunk thugs.
• Evil Is Petty: When Garnett tracks down Clay's location, he orders his goons to destroy his beehives as payback for burning down his call center. It's both petty and dumb considering the gunshots may well have tipped Clay off about their presence, and most certainly just pissed him off further.
• Evil Matriarch: Subverted. The film looks like it's building to this, looking like President Danforth is The Man Behind the Man for her son Derek, but it turns out she's sincerely clueless about all the corruption and crime he's steeped in, including rigging the election for her.
• Faux Affably Evil:
  • Garnett acts friendly and helpful during his phone conversation with Eloise. Of course, the key word is "acts"; Garnett is actually a callous, self-serving scumbag who has zero qualms about taking advantage of her trust to rob her blind.
  • On the surface, Derek appears to be an Honest Corporate Executive who is decent to his employees, on good terms with his mother and seems like a laid back business man. In truth, he's a selfish, cowardly, scumsucker of a momma's boy who isn't above online scamming and (attempted) matricide.
• Fingore:
  • Clay does this to Garmet during a shootout scene when he severs the fingers on his right hand with a bandsaw.
  • After killing another Beekeeper who was sent after him, Clay cuts off her index finger so that he can access her safehouse via fingerprint scanner.
  • Westwyld suffers a relatively minor version. After trying to talk Clay down and being a nuisance, Clay breaks his finger so he'll get out of the way and shut up.
• Foreshadowing: While reading a book about honeybees, Verona comments with interest that some worker bees will kill the hive's queen if she produces defective offspring. The FBI later comes to suspect that Clay will assassinate President Danforth for the crimes of her son.
• Gatling Good: Clay finds himself under attack from another Beekeeper with a large, car-mounted gatling gun.
• A God I Am Not: Of a kind, when met by Lazarus about his human fallibilities before their final confrontation, Adam just gives a flat "I know".
• Good Is Not Nice: FBI agent Verona Parker is a self-confessed asshole but still firmly on the side of good, despite her Cowboy Cop tendencies.
• Good Is Not Soft: Clay may be firmly on the side of the righteous, sparing innocent lives and allowing the smaller criminals a chance to walk away, but that doesn’t mean he won’t break a few heads if people bar his path, having had little to no qualms about beating the crap out of law enforcement and even giving them survivable wounds if it comes to it.
• Half the Man He Used to Be: One of the mooks subject to Clay's Elevator Failure tactic winds up sliced in half when he's caught between the open door and the falling elevator. His legs then fall out when it hits the ground floor.
• Handicapped Badass: Lazarus has an artificial leg from a past encounter with a Beekeeper who he just barely managed to kill, and proves to be on par with Clay when the two fight. Unfortunately for him, Clay kicks off his artificial leg to hobble him, at which point he doesn't have the leverage needed to fight Clay off.
• Hate Sink: The people managing the entire conspiracy are not remotely likable, being nothing more than a bunch of grimy, sleazy, overconfident shysters who seem to actively delight in draining innocent people dry of their earnings and are nothing more than Dirty Cowards when finally faced with someone their security can't handle. It makes Clay utterly destroying them all the more cathartic.
• Heroic Sacrifice: After learning she was elected via all the money her son had stolen through his phishing scam, President Danforth decides to expose it to get justice for his victims, even though it will ruin her career.
• Human Shield: Taken figuratively and literally. When an enraged assailant, whom a spoiled rotten punk son of the U.S. president's digital thefts caught the attention of makes a bee-line for them, Westwyld suggests the best way to avoid his wrath is to hide behind said politician, so as to avoid their line of fire. When this plan fails miserably, the Big Bad Wannabe literally hides behind his mother whilst having a gun to her head. Needless to say, it does not save him.
• Ignored Expert:
  • The special forces team that Westwyld assembles to try to deal with Clay when he comes for the headquarters of Derek's phishing operation in Boston attempts to shut the place down and evacuate it so they have an easier time dealing with Clay, only to be promptly ignored, first by Derek's underling in charge of the operation and then by Derek himself.
  • Westwyld himself comes off as this when dealing with the entitled, spoiled temper tantrums of his dear friend's son whom has time and again done nothing but make one bad decision after another only begetting From Bad to Worse by compounding them as time went on. It'd gotten so bad that the president could see the stress he was under because of Derek's shenanigans and poor impulse control.
• It's Personal: Clay starts his rampage because the scam targeted someone close to him, who committed suicide because of it.
• The Kingslayer: Parker reads an entry in the beekeeping guide about a bee that is meant to slay the queen if she produces defective offspring. From this, she gathers there's a serious risk that Clay might actually kill the president as part of his rampage against her douchebag son. Ultimately subverted; Clay only shoots Derek, and spares President Danforth.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: The Beekeepers as an organization agree to send an operative after Clay, but after that operative is killed, they make it clear that they will be adopting a neutral stance on Clay's efforts.
• Laser-Guided Karma: After dousing the first call center, Clay decides to put a karmic spin on it by rigging his ignition charge to the speaker of one of the phones, so the next person who falls for the scam and calls in will set it off. Clay has enough time to get out of the building for an Unflinching Walk before that happens.
• Laughably Evil:
  • Derek is a smug, loathsome Spoiled Brat, but he's so incompetent, sleazy and lethargic that it's hard not to be amused by him.
  • Downplayed with Derek's cronies. Garnett is a smooth talking evil dandy who puts on airs of being the man in charge, while the nameless middleman is an overly flamboyant douchenozzle who comes off as excessively vulgar, even when he's being complementary and especially whilst acting a prick. Both of them are dirty cowards with their minds tied to their behinds at their core selves. They melt the second the heat gets turned up like cheap margarine on a skillet.
• Locked Out of the Loop: Ironically enough; Derek's mother, Jessica, had no idea where and/or how her son garnered enough cash for her to run for president. To say she didn't take the revelation he was a cyber scammer well, is an understatement.
• Mama Didn't Raise No Criminal: Subverted; HARD. Jessica didn't even realize up until the end how her son financed her presidential campaign. After the nigh-unstoppable Vigilante Man comes blasting through the office door, in response to finding out her only child's misdeeds, she is visibly mortified.
• Minor Crime Reveals Major Plot: What initially seems like an ordinary phishing scam operation turns out to be part of a conspiracy to manipulate a presidential election.
• Mistaken from Behind: During Clay's infiltration of the party, he gets spotted by Verona. When she and Wiley start looking for him, they see from behind a bald man wearing a similar suit. But after he turns around, he turns out to be somebody else.
• Mugged for Disguise: Played with. Clay has a Secret Service disguise already, so his mugging of the agent is less to get the disguise itself than it is to slip into the man's role without arousing suspicion.
• Meaningful Name: Adam Clay, invoking the Biblical Adam who was made from the clay of the Earth. He is the archetypical man.
• Never Hurt an Innocent: Clay always refrains from using lethal force against innocents and law enforcement. There is still some collateral however, given the stunt with the elevator.
• Never My Fault: When his sins are brought to light and Jessica is seen to be visibly disgusted with how her son won her the Presidency. Derek made self-serving excuses on top of excuses to justify his actions, none of which his mother takes to heart, opting Mrs. Danforth to come clean about how she bought the presidency.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain:
  • By all appearances, Clay seemed to be satisfied with burning the offending call center to the ground and scaring the people who worked there into changing their ways, but Derek's insistence that Garnett personally track down and punish the person responsible alerted Clay to the fact that it was part of a larger operation and set him on course to follow the money. Clay clearly anticipated such retaliation, and would have dispatched the goons just as ruthlessly, but by going himself and calling Derek, Garnett gave away the fact that he had a boss.
  • The only thing that Westwyld accomplished by using his contacts to get the current Beekeeper to go after Clay was to give Clay access to a bunker full of weapons and resources he didn’t have before and that he uses to great effect to take his targets down.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Derek Danforth is a blatant stand-in for Hunter Biden, from the drugs to the prostitutes to the scams.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: The final fight with Lazarus is absolutely brutal.
• Non-Action Big Bad: Derek's an arrogant, spoiled, yuppie Smug Snake who's absolutely no physical threat to Clay - so skilled and determined he's bordering on Invincible Hero. The film's later drama comes more from if he'll actually kill President Jessica Danforth for producing a "defective offspring", as Parker puts it.
• Noodle Incident: Lazarus killed a Beekeeper in the past, but makes it clear that he knows he only won that fight because he got lucky, and it still cost him a leg.
• Oh, Crap!: The general reaction of anyone who knows about the Beekeepers and finds out that they’re dealing with one is this.
• Older Hero vs. Younger Villain: Clay is in his 40s or 50s, while Derek is mentioned to be 28.
• One-Man Army: Clay routinely wipes the floor with enemies who outnumber him dozens to one.
• Only Bad Guys Call Their Lawyers: Good guy Clay doesn't bother to invoke his right to an attorney even when confronted by the FBI upon discovering a dead body. Fortunately for him, the evidence indicates the death was a suicide. In contrast, when the FBI confront one of the scammers after Clay blows up their building, said scammer immediately lawyers up.
• Opportunistic Bastard: What Westwyld is described as by Clay when the two finally meet. Given that the former gave up his job just so he could acquire more money and power for himself than as a government agent, the retiree might not be far off the mark.
• Papa Wolf: Discussed by Clay when ruminating about people who target society's most vulnerable. He notes that while children can usually count on the adults in their life to go right up to bat for them when somebody harms them, the elderly tend to be alone and helpless, hence Clay's particular rage for anyone who hurts them.
• Plato Is a Moron: Done by proxy. According to Westwyld, even the likes of Delta Force and Seal Team 6 are "pussies" compared to Beekeepers like Clay.
• President Evil: President Jessica Danforth's son funded her campaign using money stolen as part of his phishing scams. Subverted as she didn't know he went this far in his support and is horrified when she finds out about it.
• Principles Zealot: What Adam Clay is at his core: a well meaning man whom originally just wanted a little peace in his life, but was immediately drawn back into an old world he'd left behind in order to avenge a grave injustice in his cozy little home.
• Privilege Makes You Evil: Derek's mother was the head of one of the most powerful corporations on Earth and provided him with every luxury he wanted, but that still wasn't enough for him. The plot is kicked off when he sets up a massive phishing scam to get her elected as President, willingly ruining countless lives by stealing the money of vulnerable people.
• Psychopathic Manchild: Derek comes across as an overgrown spoiled rotten teenager. He thinks he's untouchable thanks to his wealth and privilege, looks down on those around him and has absolutely no empathy for anyone else to the point that he sees nothing wrong with scamming dozens of innocent people out of their money. Bonus points for the fact that he ends up hiding behind his mother just because she's the President of the United States and even uses her as a Human Shield when things go south for him. This cap stones just how evil he is in a Dirty Coward attempt to save his own worthless hide.
• Reasonable Authority Figure:
  • The deputy director of the FBI, while understandably dubious about what he's hearing, supports Parker and Wiley fully in their investigation and gives them whatever they need to find Clay. He's actually the one who clues an appalled President Danforth in on what her son's been up to, and gets killed for it.
  • Jessica herself counts, as she is afraid and disgusted at what her son had done for entirely personal self-interest when it came to winning the presidential seat. So much so that she opts to confess to her sons crimes in a public showing after Clay's one man crusade spooks the truth to light.
• Red Herring: Once Jessica Danforth is revealed to be the president and her campaign revealed to have been funded by Derek's scams, it sets her up as a potential President Evil and the Final Boss. However, it eventually turns out that she wasn't actually aware of her son's actions and she decides to tell the truth to the public once she learns.
• Refuge in Audacity: Clay gets into the United Data Group building by walking up to it with gasoline cans and announcing he's going to burn it to the ground. No one knows how to react to it until he's already dumping the gas out.
• Retired Badass: Adam Clay was once a member of the Beekeepers, a secret government organization that works outside of the law in order to enforce justice, and was considered to be the most dangerous and skilled member of said group. He went into retirement and was content to live a peaceful life as an actual beekeeper until outside forces conspired to bring him back out into the field.
• Reusable Lighter Toss: The titular Beekeeper tosses a lighter on a rival to both eliminate the threat and find some information.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge:
  • After his friend is driven to suicide after being conned out of her livelihood, Mr. Clay travels to the scammers' headquarters, attacks them, douses their equipment (some of them included) in gasoline, and blows up the building. He then sets off to track the money all the way back to the person behind the whole scam, the son of the newly-elected President of the United States.
  • Garnett, the head of the first group of scammers, tries to do this by going after Clay with a squad of goons. Unfortunately for him, Clay is much more dangerous than he thinks.
• Scare 'Em Straight: He pulls a particularly violent version of this on the scammers working under Garnett, brutally beating one of them after they laugh off his threats and then forcing the rest to recite how they'll never scam an innocent or vulnerable person again.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!: How Derek Danforth and his lacky Garnett operate their phishing scam business. Derek abuses his mother's wealth and power as a rich CEO and president to get away with his crimes.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: Parker lets Clay go at the end, having decided that obeying the law is less important than justice he obtained for her mother and others like her, regardless of how violently it was achieved.
• Self-Made Orphan: Attempted. When it becomes clear President Danforth is going to expose Derek's phishing scam to get justice for the victims, Derek tries to kill her. When he's interrupted by Clay and Parker, he takes her hostage and is fully prepared to shoot her. Clay shoots him in the head before he can follow through.
• Shoot the Hostage Taker: Derek takes his mother hostage in a desperate attempt to protect himself, and is poised to kill her when he thinks Clay won't be dissuaded. Clay shoots him with a hip shot before he can pull the trigger.
• Shout-Out: When the bad guys seemingly have Clay at their mercy right before the final showdown, Lazarus can't resist throwing out a Hamlet reference.
  Lazarus: To bee or not to bee... Isn't that the bloody question?
  Clay: Think I'll take... to bee.
• Showy Invincible Hero: Par for the course with an action movie written by Kury Wimmer (Doubly so when starring Jason Statham), Clay faces hardly anyone that could really be considered a real threat to him physically but keeps things from getting boring by dispatching them in inventive ways. The only one who can fight him on even footing is his very last opponent, Lazarus, and even then, Clay still comes out on top after exploiting his handicap.
• Sir Not-Appearing-in-This-Trailer: Jemma Redgrave isn't in any of the promotional material, despite playing a major role in the second half of the film. Namely, Derek's mother and the President of the United States.
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: Partway into the movie, one cannot go for more than a few minutes without wading through a Cluster F-Bomb drop field between characters.
• Skewed Priorities: The hackers in Danforth's service are so absorbed in surfing the net for pigeons to fleece for big money that they tend to ignore the danger of an unknown assailant popping in out of nowhere and handing them their asses before tearing their workspace to the ground. They were even given flier notices of what he looked like as a precaution, but they are often seen as too busy being jerkasses in their own right to care about the danger they're in.
• Small Name, Big Ego: Both Garnett and the Middle Manager play up as if they're big deals, making a lot of money at the expense of hapless people they scam while surrounded by extra security and slimy hackers doing all the dirty work. But the minute either of them meet Adam Clay face to face? They quickly dissolve into the weak willed, empty minded, gutless, yellow conmen hiding behind their goons that they are. The former literally hides behind a security guard as Adam is ripping through Garnett's men.
• Smug Snake: Most of the villains, particularly the management types, are extremely arrogant and tend to sneer at Clay, right up until they realize who they're dealing with.
• Spoiled Brat: Derek has been given everything he wanted throughout his life, leaving him an entitled Jerkass who doesn't care about ruining lives if it gets him what he wants.
• Spy-Tux Reveal: Clay slips out of his security outfit, revealing a tux beneath so he can join the party undetected.
• Starter Villain: Garnett is the manager of the call center that victimized Eloise and the initial target of Clay's wrath, but he turns out to be merely the tip of a much larger iceberg.
• State Sec: The Beekeepers are an organization with the stated purpose of protecting "the hive", i.e. the United States, from things that might threaten its stability. They have unlimited resources and are answerable to no one. They can't be requested to take action, but only do so if they feel it's warranted. Given their small size, it's less a matter of enforcing individual behavior than protecting the system as a whole, limiting their activities to the really big threats.
• Stealth Insult: Jessica tells Derek that he's good-looking but "God doesn't give with both hands."
• Stupid Evil: Westwyld cannot seem to get enough of throwing this in Derek's face. Hell, the final sanction he hires out even pitches in at the late stage.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: After Eloise commits suicide, Adam is arrested and it looks like the movie will set up a Clear My Name plot. However, the investigation clears Adam of any involvement in her death; while he is hounded by law enforcement, it's to stop his Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
• Suspect Is Hatless: The first time Derek tries to find out more about Adam, the only thing Mickey can tell him was that he was wearing a hat.
• Sympathy for the Hero: During their confrontation, Westwyld says he's sorry about the fact that Clay lost a close friend despite being on opposite sides.
• Take That!: In an interview with Polygon, David Ayer mentioned that the villains of the film were largely inspired by “crypto-bros”. Indeed, at multiple points, the villains mention things like NFTs and the Blockchain, if only as distractions from their real scam.
• Technologically Blind Elders: Exploited and played for drama. The villains take advantage of elderly people who are computer-illiterate to swindle them out of their life savings. Eloise notes that her daughter was the one who set up her computer.
• The Teetotaler: After Clay's non-role in Eloise's death is cleared up, Verona offers him a stiff drink. Clay declines.
• To Be Lawful or Good:
  • Wiley, Verona's partner, suggests to her that they allow Clay to just complete his work and expresses his belief that Clay's actions are in the right. (It helps that Clay had Wiley completely at his mercy earlier, but spared him, knowing he's one of the good guys.) Verona is obviously torn and acknowledges that she also thinks he's justified, but states they must continue to do their jobs.
  • Clay invokes this to her in the climax when she has him at gunpoint while Derek is holding his mother hostage, asking her whether she'll side with the law or with justice. After he kills Derek and then jumps out the window to escape, she does have the chance to shoot him (which would be the lawful thing to do after how many people he's killed), but chooses to let him go, saying "Goodbye, Adam Clay."
• Too Clever by Half: Something which describes Derek from start to finish. He stole and reworked secret government encryption coding for the sake of ill gotten financial intake, all while smugly believing no one would ever find out about his long con, much less be able to do anything about it if discovered anyway. Needless to say, the little jerk gets a pretty rude awakening in the form of an indomitable ex-secret agent man, who singlehandedly dismantles his entire operation before finding him just to shoot him in his face.
• Too Dumb to Live: Most amongst the opposing faction whom Clay meets can be seen as this:
  • Mickey Garnett: Really should've left well enough alone when one guy singlehandedly crippled and/or incapacitated his guardsmen before blowing up his base of operations. He could've avoided the loss of his fingers and getting dragged behind an old pickup straight into a local riverbank otherwise.
  • Hacker Clients: One team doesn't take the mystery guy who came in with two tanks of gasoline remotely seriously, much less a serious threat, until after he beats one of them senseless and starts pouring it all over their equipment. A couple of them get dribbled on as a consequence.
  • Derek Danforth: Stupidly antagonizes Clay both directly and indirectly through his men and over the phone, tipping off just how far the web of corruption his business runs along with where and what nerve centers he needed to hit to cripple it before coming at him personally.
  • Wallace Westwyld: Knowing full well just what a dumb venture that the top secret facility Derek had pilfered was being used for, he still opts to keep protecting the overconfident little twerp despite knowing just who and what was headed their way regardless.
  • The Middle Manager: Obnoxiously inept when first appearing on scene, he practically had fliers of the guy who was tearing down the business in office, and still turns down the extra security's sound advice of a full evacuation without even realizing Adam already infiltrated the building.
• Too Good for This Sinful Earth: Adam certainly thinks so of Eloise. The acts of vengeance he commits are more than just because of the genuine kindness she showed him. Brief soliloquys made in her name every now and then, during his running and gunning down her indirect killers, subsequently putting their phone line scamming out of business, really go to show how much Adam loved her as a person.
• Torture Always Works: Clay brutalizes the middle manager by using a stapler on his hands and forehead repeatedly until the man breaks and gives up his boss. To his credit, the man provides photographic evidence just to make sure Clay knows he's telling the truth.
• Traveling at the Speed of Plot: The whole story from start to finish lasts less than 48 hours. A ridiculous pace when you consider how long actual forensic and computer analysis can take during an investigation. Eloise's body isn't even in the ground by the time Clay has worked his way up the ladder driving through several states to do it.
• Underside Ride: Clay slips into the beach house by clinging to the underside of one of the catering trucks, waiting for one of the bomb detection crew to slide under there with him, then knocks the man out and stuffs his body into the spot so he can replace him.
• Understatement: Garnet tends to do this when talking to Derek. He refers to Clay, who just burned down his office, as a "disgruntled customer." When he has his fingers chopped off, he says he's "bleeding."
• Villain Ball: If Derek hadn't insisted Garnet go after Clay, everything might have ended right there. Clay destroyed the call center and gave the scammers a second chance. Instead their attack clues Clay in to the fact it wasn't just the one group. And things escalate from there.
• Villainous Breakdown: Derek doesn't take the whole super assassin coming to kill him because he is too dumb and high on drugs and alcohol to care but his mom talking about exposing the truth puts him on edge and leads to him shoot the Number Two at the FBI then try to shoot his own mom when cornered by Clay.
• Virtuous Bees: The relationship between honeybees and humans is extensively discussed, particularly the important role bees play in human agriculture.
• Wham Line: Hearing an African delegation refer to Derek's mother as "Madame President" adds an entirely new dimension to the potential consequences of Clay's actions.
• What a Drag: Clay uses a ratcheting strap to tie Garnet to his truck and then sends the truck careening toward a currently-raised bridge, dragging Garnet for a bit before the truck takes a long dive and brings Garnet to the depths with it.
• Wicked Wasps: When addressing the call center employees, Clay likens people such as them to hornets that prey on innocent, hardworking bees.
• World of Jerkass: Most everyone on film, save a select few, is a complete and utter douchebag. From the protagonist faction we have the main FBI agents with one admitting to being a cunt in and of themself. The antagonistic faction has out and out douchebags who really ham it up on how much a bunch of dicks they are.
• Would Not Shoot a Good Guy: While Clay will stop at nothing until he takes down the man responsible for driving his neighbor to her death, he shows that he still has standards. He differentiates his opposition between the guilty ones complicit in crimes and the innocent ones who are only enforcing the law. He kills those directly employed by his targets while he takes care to spare the lives of police officers, FBI, and Secret Service who are trying to restrain his rampage.
• Wounded Gazelle Gambit: Crossed with Playing the Victim Card, this is how Garnett tricks Eloise out of her lifesavings and charity fund. He uses crocodile tears backing the old "threat of losing his job" plight to overlay a misconceived money transferal screwup, thus placating what an unadulterated scumbag he is.

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"We have to kill him. Before he kills his way to the top."

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