Jason Statham movies are among my guilty pleasures. They are a lot like AC/DC records in that you know exactly what you’re getting, with reliable assurance that it will be an entertaining event.
From director Jean-François Richet, the latest entry in the Statham canon, “Mutiny,” finds him in the steadfast and familiar role of Cole Reed, an ex-British policeman and soldier working as bodyguard and chauffeur for Tibu, a Bangkok shipping billionaire. “Mutiny” isn’t exactly “Back in Black,” but like much of AC/DC’s latter catalogue, it is formulaic and reliably fun.
Sure enough, if Jason Statham is your bodyguard, something will go wrong (this is actually written into his contract). Shortly after announcing the sale of his firm, Tibu is ambushed and murdered — an unusually eventful furrow in a mergers and acquisitions transaction. Framed for his boss’s murder, Reed follows the trail of one of the hired gunmen aboard a large cargo vessel owned by Tibu’s company.
Much of the film unfolds aboard the ship, its hull, bridge, ventilation shafts, and stacks of shipping containers serving as playgrounds in which Statham theatrically dispatches bad men. Reed also encounters Angie Ellis (Annabelle Wallis), the ship’s newly assigned third mate, who is unaware that its captain and crew are facilitating a human-trafficking operation. After stumbling upon the victims hidden in the cargo hold, Angie tries to help them and promptly lands herself in the crew’s crosshairs.
The plot partners Reed and Angie together and throws in an underdeveloped thread about Angie’s young daughter waiting for her back home. The film appreciably avoids the temptation to shoehorn a superfluous romance between the pair, though Angie herself remains largely inconsequential. At times, she feels like an addition demanded after some studio executive read the first screenplay draft and wondered how to broaden the demographics. Who do they think is watching these films?
Once the captain and crew realize Angie has discovered their operation, the action gets underway. The maritime setting and tone inevitably recall such ’90s pop-cinema throwbacks as Steven Seagal’s “Under Siege” — another lean, bruising action flick confined to a ship and populated by simpleminded henchmen awaiting painful deaths. Statham, however, composes himself like the real deal, and Richet stages the fights with gratifying brutality. I have always thought Statham is the action star Seagal wanted to be. Seagal wound up recording strange blues-reggae albums and hanging out with Vladimir Putin; Statham keeps producing a new action film every year. They may be variations on the same theme, but they are almost always guaranteed to charm.
My main gripe with “Mutiny” is that it betrays the simplicity of its conceit by piling on parallel storylines. There is Tibu’s assassination and the business intrigue behind it, the trafficking operation aboard the ship, Angie’s effort to get home to her daughter, and the obligatory dossier on Reed’s decorated past. None is especially complicated, but together they clutter a movie whose pleasures are refreshingly elemental: put Jason Statham on a boat full of criminals and let nature take its course.
The morality of Statham’s film universe is similarly straightforward. Reed is an unwavering stoic with an almost supernatural capacity to inflict damage. Had he been written into Greek mythology, he would surely be a demigod: stronger, faster, and quicker-witted than ordinary men. What defines him is how he directs those gifts. Personally, if my employer were assassinated on the job, my instinct would be to contact HR regarding new openings — after posting on LinkedIn what my boss’s untimely murder taught me about B2B sales. Reed instead pursues his boss’s killers and, upon discovering a human-trafficking operation along the way, makes dismantling it a side quest in his mission of revenge. That says something about his morality. And we are all the more entertained for it.
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Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com.
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