Joel on Film

Sometimes, all one really needs is to watch Jason Statham punch, pummel, shoot, kick or otherwise disable some bad guys for a pretty good reason, and Mutiny is the latest example of this. Obviously, the quality of these movies sort of depends on both the specific scenario that has been placed in front of the Statham character and the commitment to the bit displayed by the actor and the filmmakers. Here, it’s a screenplay (by Lindsay Michel and J.P. Davis) that and a director, Jean-Francois Richet, who give Statham’s Cole Reed a human trafficking operation to uncover and a death to avenge.

Really, one doesn’t even need to know the details of the plot beyond that final sentence, because the plot is so basic that one can plug all the details in by process of elimination—a process aided by having seen a bunch of Statham’s other movies, which prospective viewers of this one will undoubtedly have done. Reed was in various phases of the military, including a couple of covert deployments here and there, followed by a stint with police that ended in a disagreement about how far “too far” really was. Now, he’s the chief security officer to an executive currently in the process of selling his company.

That executive, who had become something of a father figure to Reed following the death of his own father a few years ago, is killed in an attempted kidnapping on the very evening of the sale, and Reed, passing himself off as an operative of the man responsible, finds himself on a freighter ship belonging to the tycoon’s company. Aboard the ship are a couple dozen crew members and their boss, ship’s captain Marko (Roland Møller), as well as a cargo container holding about a dozen men, women and children set to be trafficked for a price. Reed promises the captives their freedom, and then Angie Ellis (Annabelle Wallis), a security officer loaned out to the company on the weekend she’s supposed to have custody of her daughter, a bit too publicly tries to help after discovering them herself.

That’s about the extent of the plot, although Adrian Lester plays a Captain of the United States Navy who is alerted to the trouble aboard the ship and decides to investigate, while Simon Kluth appears a few times as the man bankrolling both the hostile takeover of the company and the cover-up of the trafficking operation. It’s all an excuse for Statham to employ his usual tough-guy-with-a-smirk persona to wage war against all twentysomething henchmen. Naturally he is exceptionally good at doing this, barely breaking a sweat or suffering an injury along the way.

The name of the game is the gallows sense of humor in how Reed more or less finds his weapons all around him, from the lock of a padlock used as a hook of sorts (this portends his later use of an actual hook) to wielding a rather short and dull knife when his adversary has a rather large ax. The setting is important, too, because the inside of a freighter is not exactly a paragon of space or capaciousness. The stairwells are narrow and cramped, giving the folks here not a whole lot of time to rally before the volleys of gunfire.

Are there contrivances here? Obviously, such as the fact that Reed can use a lookalike to bypass the security of this place, or a minor twist involving whose actions led the bad guys to the tycoon’s exact location the night of the kidnapping attempt, or how the final scenes even allow, logistically speaking, for Reed to find himself where he is, while conveniently skipping over the “how.” We don’t ask for logic if the rest of the movie compensates with solid entertainment, though, and this movie is no different.

It’s all quite, quite entertaining, too, because Richet knows precisely what his audience wants from a movie like this and, with solid forward momentum that propels us through the pieces of this plot, delivers it with showmanship and aplomb. Mutiny isn’t necessarily anything new in the wide, wide world of Statham-starring actioners, but it’s a good time all the same, offering what we expect and a few shades here and there of what we don’t.

Rating: *** (out of ****)