What’s It About

After his billionaire industrialist boss is murdered in front of him, Cole Reed is set up to take the fall for the crime — leaving him on the run as he works to uncover an international conspiracy.

MOVIESinMO REVIEW

Jason Statham’s career can be boiled down to a single description: he does one thing and does it right. This is a story of a guy who was just minding his own business when he got tangled in something nasty and is now forced to deal with it like a pro. Mutiny doesn’t deviate from this formula. The movie starts off slow, winningly teasing us when it should have started making a lot of noise already. For the first thirty minutes, we’re introduced to Cole Reed’s world. Cole works as the head of security for Tibu Campallo, a successful businessman in Bangkok. At first, we are supposed to understand that Tibu is a good guy who treats Cole as a friend rather than a mere employee, but I believe that the significance of this portrayal could come out prior to the violent events in the movie. The trouble is, by the time things turn violent, the majority of the movie has already gone by without any thrill at all. It is not good news for such a short film. After Cole sneaks onto the cargo liner Artemis in order to find the murderers of his employer, Mutiny finally figures out what type of movie it was supposed to be. The filmmaker Jean-François Richet, who had Gerard Butler in a similar dilemma, likes to put his lead into confined spaces, making him fight his way out. The ship offers great possibilities for that; with its narrow aisles, piled cargo containers, and metal staircases, any fight turns into an endless and painful riddle. Statham does his job in the same manner he did before, smashing villains with the help of bullets, machetes, an axe, and anything available at the moment. Although that is not genius, it is still rewarding, and the action deserves to be acknowledged for making hand-to-hand combat believable, not scripted. Roland Møller plays the ship’s corrupt captain with a cold, physical menace that suits the material, even if the character himself never becomes much more than an obstacle for Cole to remove. That is fairly standard for this kind of movie, and Møller at least makes the obstacle memorable while he is on screen. He glowers convincingly, barks orders convincingly, and gets dispatched exactly the way you would guess. What keeps Mutiny from rising above its formula is how little it trusts anyone besides its star. Cole discovers that the ship is smuggling trafficking victims inside one of its containers, and this discovery should give the movie some real weight. Instead, the people trapped in that container barely become characters at all. Their only existence is to raise the stakes and remind everyone that the bad guys are really bad guys. Mutiny never slows down long enough to give them names we remember or reasons we should care beyond the obvious. That is a missed chance (just like in Supergirl) because a story built around human trafficking has serious material to work with, and Mutiny treats it as backdrop rather than substance. It’s the same situation when it comes to the rest of the supporting cast close to Jason Statham. Even though Ramon Tikaram does a great job playing Tibu for the limited time that he spent in front of the camera, he gets killed off pretty soon and doesn’t give us the chance to really learn about him other than making his death a plot device to motivate Cole in his revenge. Adrian Lester appears in the role of a Navy captain who is coordinating the rescue operations remotely, and he manages to be very authoritative, but his role consists of little more than talking on a radio. There is nothing wrong with the talent of the actors chosen for minor roles; it’s just that the script doesn’t allow them to show their capacity, as it is almost exclusively centered around Cole, making all other characters unimportant. Annabelle Wallis fares a little better as Angie Ellis, the ship’s third mate who gets pulled into the fight after finding the trafficking victims herself. She holds her own in a few tense moments and does not simply wait around for Cole to rescue her. Still, her backstory about missing time with her daughter feels tacked on mostly to give her a reason to want off the ship, rather than to build a real person with her own stakes in the story. She gets more to do than most of the supporting cast, but not quite enough to leave a lasting mark once the credits roll. None of this makes Mutiny a bad watch. It knows exactly what kind of movie it is, and once it clears its slow setup, it delivers hard-hitting fights in a setting that feels physically real, since much of it was shot aboard an actual ship. Statham remains reliable in a role he has essentially played many times before, and the film moves fast enough in its second half to make you nearly forget how long it took to get started. It will not surprise anyone, and it does not try to. What it offers is competent, well-staged action wrapped around a story that never bothers to develop anyone standing next to its lead. Mutiny serves as a good reminder that Statham is still able to lead a film through the sheer force of physicality, even if the plot around him doesn’t do much of anything interesting. Statham fans that might have enjoyed his previous films like The Beekeeper or Plane may feel comfortable and entertained by this film. But for those looking for a plot with solid side characters or a first act that is actually filled with some tension, it’s going to take some time before the actual movie begins to take off.

OUR RATING – A STANDARD STATHAM 6