‘Mutiny’ Leaves Jason Statham Adrift
The action-thriller fails to maximize its star or its setting.
One of the most comforting types of movies these days is “Jason Statham beats people up.” These movies don’t cost very much; they’re straightforward (did you kill someone close to Jason Statham’s character? I HAVE SOME BAD NEWS), and they let a guy who’s a real athlete and martial artist with a clear persona do his thing. They are very much “do what they say on the tin” kind of films, and as I said earlier this year with Shelter, that can be quite satisfying. But within this particular sub-genre of action movies, there are still levels of quality, and sadly, Mutiny doesn’t know how to make the most of Statham. What should be an exciting “We know this is Under Siege, but we’ve upgraded from Steven Seagal to Jason Statham,” instead is a fairly listless affair, never figuring out how to use the confines of a shipping boat combined with Statham’s action acumen. Sure, he still beats people up, but you’ve gone awry when your bloodiest battle is just people shooting at each other in a stairwell.
Cole Reed (Statham) is a former British cop and Navy officer now working security in Bangkok for shipping magnate Tibu (Ramon Tikaram). The two have formed a friendship, but Tibu’s decision to sell his company doesn’t sit well with an evil businessman who wants to kill the deal, so he sets an ambush for Cole and Tibu. Tibu dies, but Cole, after killing all the assailants, discovers that one was employed by Tibu’s company and was due to set sail on the Artemis. In a miraculous coincidence, this assailant is also a bald, muscular white guy, so Cole poses as the dead baddie to get on the ship. Looking for answers to Tibu’s murder, he then discovers a shipping container full of human trafficking victims. Finding an ally in the ship’s third mate Angie Ellis (Annabelle Wallis), they discover that the rest of the crew, led by Captain Marko Madsen (Roland Møller), are running a human trafficking operation. Eager to save the captives and find those responsible for Tibu’s murder, Cole kills lots of dudes.
The genesis of this project appeared to be, “I would like Jason Statham to kill a bunch of guys on a boat,” and hey, that’s not a bad starting place. But if you want to worship at the altar of Die Hard (guy trapped in a location versus bad guys), then you’ve got to do a bit better than what director Jean-François Richet does here. Cole is the thinnest sketch of a character, and the thing about Statham is if you ask him for more, he’ll give you more. He can do all action stuff, but as seen in movies like Wild Card or Safe, even if the surrounding material isn’t amazing, he’s still a solid performer. Unfortunately, there’s almost no emotional weight here beyond Cole wanting vengeance for Tibu’s death. And that’s just the pretext for the violence.
Unfortunately, the violence here is also fairly unimaginative. We don’t even have an idea of the geography of the ship, or why Cole and Angie are able to maneuver around it better than Marko, who works there. When it does come to fisticuffs, the movie stumbles in pacing out the action. There’s a good brawl when Cole first comes across the container full of human trafficking victims, but then there’s a fairly long stretch of Cole and Angie scrambling around the ship. Not every imitator can be as good as Die Hard (few are!), but that movie sets a clear template of how different locations are meant to offer different kinds of violent action. Mutiny misses this note, so that instead of Cole picking guys off throughout the movie, he has to take care of most of them in a single, cramped location in a fairly uninspired manner. It’s an action scene so bland that it could have taken place anywhere rather than making use of the boat as a unique setting.
Mutiny does indeed deliver on the basic premise of “Jason Statham beats people up,” and it’s an R-rated movie, so you get the full impact of the violence. For those who want nothing more than that, then I suppose Mutiny will satisfy that desire. But for those who know that Statham is capable of much more both as an actor and as an action star, Mutiny feels like a waste of his talents. Thankfully, one of the benefits of being a Jason Statham fan is that you don’t have to wait too long for his next action outing, and there's renewed hope that it will do justice to his talents.
Mutiny opens in theaters on Friday, August 21.
Over at Decoding Everything, I wrote about some major takeaways from this summer movie season:
Matt Goldberg
