THE STORY – When his friend and mentor is murdered in front of him, former Marine commando Cole Reed sets out on a mission to avenge his brother-in-arms – a mission that takes him into international waters, where he uncovers sinister secrets that go deeper than he ever expected.
THE CAST – Jason Statham, Annabelle Wallis, Roland Møller & Adrian Lester
THE TEAM – Jean-François Richet (Director), Lindsay Michel & J.P. Davis (Writers)
THE RUNNING TIME – 95 Minutes
If we are truly living, as many film critics and cultural commentators have bemoaned over the past several years, in a world with no movie stars, then someone forgot to tell Jason Statham. Every year or so, like clockwork, the British former Olympic diver releases another tried-and-true star vehicle, just like Van Damme and Segal before him. Oddly enough, unlike those ‘80s-’90s action stars, Statham’s vehicles never skip theaters to go straight to home viewing, despite their straightforward, visually unimaginative action. It’s this insistence on theatrical releases that perhaps marks him as a true movie star; he’s one of the few actors left who can consistently open a movie and get it to make back its budget. That’s largely because Statham’s films all understand exactly what his audience wants to see, and deliver accordingly; while they don’t have the exact same plot, they do more or less the same things. While it’s generally true that the more ridiculous the premise of a Statham movie, the better it is (“The Meg”, “The Beekeeper”), all of his star vehicles are so tightly yoked to his no-frills persona that they don’t end up all that different in terms of quality. To that end, though, Statham needs a director who can match him, blow for heavy-hitting blow. David Ayer, who directed the one-two punch of “The Beekeeper” and “A Working Man,” can do that seemingly in his sleep. Still, Jean-François Richet, director of the stultifyingly dull Gerard Butler vehicle “Plane,” is a less steady hand.
“Mutiny,” Statham’s latest star vehicle, has a script so bluntly perfunctory that no one in it sounds fully human. This makes the film’s first act grueling to get through, as we watch Statham’s Cole Reed, head of security for Bangkok shipping magnate Tibu Campallo (Ramon Tikaram), go about his job. Reed once put his own life in danger to save Campallo’s, and now the businessman considers him part of the family. Tibu and his son, Kameron (Chaneil Kular), are about to sell the company, but before they’re able to, Tibu and Cole are ambushed. After watching his employer and good friend die right in front of him, Cole learns that one of their attackers was an employee of the company, due to report for duty on a cargo ship that evening. Hoping to find answers as to who killed Tibu and why, Cole sneaks onto the ship, only to find a shipping crate full of sick, starving migrants. Will Cole be able to work with substitute third shipsmate Angie Ellis (Annabelle Wallis) to get them to safety and hold the ship’s rotten captain (Roland Møller) accountable?
Richet acquits himself best in the film’s close-quarters fight scenes. Given the tight spaces Cole finds himself in onboard the ship, Richet and cinematographer Brendan Galvin have to come up with some clever camera positions and movements in order to capture everything. The up-close style gives the actors and stunt performers no room to hide, and they go for the jugular, slashing and shooting up a storm. One moment where Cole uses a padlock as an improvised weapon hits especially hard, and they appropriately save the most bad-ass, righteous kill for last. Statham doesn’t go in for the big, flashy, 87North-style action sequences that are all the rage in Hollywood these days, preferring to keep things old-school with simple but effective choreography that stays legible no matter how much you chop it up in the edit. Richet’s rhythmic, muscular style complements it, helped immensely by the ominous drones of Marcus Trumpp’s bass-heavy score.
Unfortunately, there’s not much Richet can do about the screenplay’s leaden dialogue, which stops the film dead in its tracks whenever characters have to exchange more than a few lines at a time. The worst mistake a writer can make when writing a Jason Statham star vehicle is to mistake Statham’s screen persona for his actual personality, and Lindsay Michel and J. P. Davis fall into that trap here: None of the characters here have any personality, but Cole is particularly bland, a collection of clichés about justice and loyalty who doesn’t even get the benefit of a fun, quotable kill line. Statham’s magnetic, mean-mugging screen presence can carry blander characters than this, but Wallis and Møller can only push their way through that flat, near-unspeakable dialogue and pray, and poor Adrian Lester has to resort to imitating Trammell Tillman’s memorable work in “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” to put his Naval officer over.
The incorporation of the human trafficking element doesn’t really help matters, either. Last year’s “A Working Man” covered the topic through a much more personal lens, with Statham’s Levon Cade setting off to rescue his good friend/employer’s daughter. Here, he happens upon the trafficking while looking for something else, and the film treats it as an afterthought, despite it being central to the whole plot. To the extent that all action star vehicles must present their leading man as a paragon of masculine values, having the trafficking victims all be non-English-speaking migrant refugees could be seen as a bold choice, given the current political climate. But Statham’s unflinching, unquestioning sense of honor sees all innocents as worth protecting, and he just sees people in need of proper care, and maybe if Action Star Jason Statham sees refugees as humans worthy of compassion, then maybe you can see them that way, too!
That said, no one is coming to a Jason Statham movie for trenchant sociopolitical commentary. They’re coming to watch a strong, silent man of honor dish out justice with his fists. On that front, “Mutiny” delivers all the hard-hitting, blood-splattering action you could want. Statham, too, delivers on all the things we want from him onscreen, even having the honor to treat Wallis’s Angie as a capable peer and not a potential love interest. At nearly sixty years old, Statham’s physical prowess onscreen remains impressive. He’s proven he can do more as an actor, but saving stiff, stilted screenplays from themselves through sheer star power is a key part of a movie star’s job description. It’s nice to have evidence that there are still actors out there who can do that, even if it’s easy to wish Statham had better material to work with. “Mutiny” isn’t as strong overall as Statham’s other recent films, but in the moments where it lives up to its potential, Statham fans will be satiated.
