Review: MUTINY

 by Rob DiCristino

You should have called it Boat, you COWARDS.

My father once told me that if I chose a job I loved, I wouldn’t work a day in my life. I’ve never forgiven him for lying to me like that, but I couldn’t help thinking about that advice during my screening of Mutiny, a streaming-ready Die Hard clone in which Jason Statham punches, stabs, and assault-rifles his way across a container ship full of faceless henchmen. If there’s one thing I know about Jason Statham — one thing his twenty-plus years on our silver screens has taught me — it’s that he absolutely loves killing people. Just adores it. He’s good at it, too! Remember when he decapitated Scott Adkins with a propeller blade? Remember when he cut off that guy’s hand and shot him with his own gun while it was still in that same hand? Or when he kicked that dude into a shark’s mouth? Oh! What about when he broke that guy’s neck as he was falling to his death from an airplane? That’s not soulless, workaday action hero stuff. That’s the kind of vocational enthusiasm reserved for those who have found their true calling. I want that. I do. I want what Jason Statham has!

But I digress. Directed by Frenchman Jean-Francois Richet, Statham’s latest justification for cinematic mayhem sees him playing Cole Reed, a former British special forces hero seeking vengeance for the murder of his beloved employer (Ramon Tikram as Tibu Campallo), a Thai shipping magnate whose empire has been co-opted by shady characters of mysterious origin. On the run from the authorities and desperate to find Tibu’s killer, Cole boards a company container ship and discovers a human trafficking ring supervised by Captain Madsen (Roland Møller). Along with third officer Angie Something (Annabelle Wallis) — an ex-Navy whitehat playing the Al Powell to Statham’s John McClane — Cole must free the people trapped on board, discover the truth about Tibu’s murder, and find innovative new methods of dismembering the two dozen human beings who will try to prevent him from doing those things. What do you think is going to happen? You know, if you had to guess? You think he kills them? Maybe with a fish hook or a spear gun? Or, I don’t know, a padlock?

I have fantastic news for you. He does all of those things and more. While it may lack the balls-to-the-wall depravity of Neveldine and Taylor’s Crank films or the scumbag elegance of Guy Ritchie’s symphonic Wrath of Man, Mutiny’s meat-and-potatoes streamlining of reliable action tropes means there’s very little bothersome plot or character to get in the way of Statham kicking a hunting knife through a mook’s cheek before stabbing him in the head. Some screenwriters would spring for a researcher to ensure that their depictions of maritime military action are as accurate as possible, but Lindsay Michel and J.P. Davis thought it wiser to invest that energy in things like headshots and axe murder, choosing to have Navy Captain Something or Other (Adrian Lester) and his crew of jackbooted beefcakes putz around and let the mayhem unfold unimpeded until the last possible second. This is all complimentary, by the way. Mutiny is exactly as brainless and irresponsible as it should be; it aspires to absolutely nothing and succeeds with flying colors.

After cutting his English-language teeth on underwhelming thrillers like Blood Father and the Assault on Precinct 13 remake, Jean-Francois Richet finally earned the Jaume Collet-Serra Award for Excellence in Distasteful Schlock — an award I just made up — with 2023’s unexpected delight, Plane. Richet brings that same combination of technical craftsmanship and reckless abandon to Mutiny, demonstrating many of the invisible and frankly underappreciated skills that journeymen action directors so often lack: His shootout scenes are geographically coherent — you usually understand who’s shooting at whom and from where — and his close-quarter fight scenes have a rawness that less confident directors working with less seasoned leading men might try to edit around. Again, there’s nothing in Mutiny that approaches the complete disregard for human dignity of the Crank films or even the roided-out explosa-palooza of the Expendables series, but Richet and his crew prove that staying inside the lines doesn’t make the final drawing any less colorful.

Will Mutiny ultimately stand out amongst the Beekeepers, Working Mans, Mechanics, Megs, and Shelters of Jason Statham’s filmography? Probably not! Does its open admission of theft from John McTiernan’s 1988 action masterpiece — one of Mutiny’s posters is a cheeky recreation of Die Hard’s famous one-sheet — give its utter unoriginality a pass? Absolutely not! Will someone have to convince me I’ve already seen this film when I go to watch it on Amazon Prime eight weeks from now? They absolutely will! But remember: At the end of the day, Mutiny isn’t really about me. It isn’t really about you. It isn’t really about heroism or justice. It isn’t really about the evil of human trafficking or the love between a fallen father figure and his heartbroken son. No, Mutiny is really about Jason Statham’s unquenchable thirst for R-rated bloodshed. The dude loves shooting people. Stabbing them. Using their bodies to break his fall from tall buildings. Kicking their disembodied heads into swimming pools. Statham chose a job he loved, and god bless him, he doesn’t work a day in his life.

Mutiny hits U.S. theaters on Friday, August 21st.