‘Mutiny’ Review: Jason Statham in a Boilerplate Maritime Action Flick

It takes nearly the entire movie for the denim jacket worn by Jason Statham in Mutiny to get messed up, and this after his character has killed nearly two dozen bad guys using a variety of automatic weapons, at least two knives, his own fists and, in one gross-out moment, a padlock he employs to rip a gaping hole through a man’s cheek. Amid all of this, he performs surgery to remove a bullet from the shoulder of his female sidekick, Angie (Annabelle Wallis). And yet, that jacket remains spotless.

Details such as this emerge while watching this merely serviceable maritime action flick, whose plot is so boilerplate, and whose characters so unidimensional, that there’s not much else to take interest in. Competently if routinely directed by Jean-François Richet, who previously put Mel Gibson on a motorcycle in Blood Father and Gerard Butler on a fallen plane in, well, Plane, this one sets Statham on a cargo ship filled with human-trafficking mercenaries he exterminates in gory, sometimes giddy ways.

How Statham’s character, who bears the AI-generated action hero name of Cole Reed, manages to get on that vessel requires a swift setup involving a Bangkok-based shipping magnate (Ramon Tikaram) gunned down while under Reed’s protection. Determined to avenge his boss and save the man’s son (Chaneil Kular) from the same fate, the former cop and Iraq War vet becomes a stowaway on a massive container ship heading out to sea. (A backstory involving the death of Reed’s father is meant to explain our hero’s unerring drive, but it’s dispatched with so quickly that it barely registers.)

Once he’s aboard, Reed discovers that one of the shipping containers is filled with Thai refugees being held prisoner until the boat’s crooked captain (Roland Møller) sells them off as slaves. Naturally, Reed will not let this pass, so he starts methodically slaughtering the ship’s crew of well-armed former soldiers, using the vessel’s tight spaces and maze-like architecture to take them out while doing his best to protect the precious cargo.

He also joins forces with Angie, a veteran of the Navy who was part of the captain’s team until she realized what they were up to. Soon she’s fighting by Reed’s side, though if you were hoping for some kind of romantic subplot, be advised that there’s zero sexual tension between the two, who spend their time murdering and/or beating the crap out of whoever crosses their path. Reed especially faces little resistance until the big showdown against the captain, during which that denim jacket finally gets a stain.

What else is there to say about Mutiny? Not much, honestly. Statham, who turned 59 this summer and is still in incredible shape, performs on his usual high-octane, no-time-for-nonsense level. But he’s also playing his cards a bit too close compared to the exuberance of David Ayer’s recent The Beekeeper, which better served the actor’s talent for dramatic understatement and fists-a-flying overstatement.

In the end, Mutiny really does little more than what its poster, trailer and tagline (“There’s blood in the water” — though it’s actually much more below deck) tell you it will do, barely coloring outside the lines beyond a few cool kill scenes. That may be enough for diehard Statham stalwarts — the Paris theatre where I caught the screening was roughly 80% male, most of them between the ages of 30 and 60 — but a movie needs to deliver more than good-enough fan service to be a breakout hit nowadays.

At best, this umpteenth entry in the Statham cannon feels like a throwback to a time when all that was needed to get butts in seats was plenty of butt-kicking on screen. In that sense, Mutiny may give some folks all that they were looking for, treading enough water to keep its aging action star from sinking.