Jason Statham has been committed to making a particular kind of action movie lately. It’s the kind where, midway through, someone pulls up a file on his character and uses it to lay out his history in partially redacted bullet points — military service, law-enforcement work, membership in some elite unit, inevitable breaking point. This has to happen for two reasons, the most obvious one being that Statham is always playing an unstoppable killing machine who happens to be laying low as a beekeeper, a construction foreman, an Outer Hebrides hermit, or, in this most recent iteration, a bodyguard, and the movie needs to explain why he’s able to snap necks like so many asparagus spears. The other reason for the file read is that the guys Statham plays in these movies are always stoic, preferring a glower or a wry look to conversation, and even if their backstories serve a largely ceremonial function in what are otherwise odes to kicking ass, they aren’t about to go long on it. Why would they bother? These are not movies about rich interior lives. Early in Mutiny, Statham’s latest outing, there’s a moment in which his character, Cole Reed, looks over photos of his late father on a tablet, then wishes the man a happy birthday. That’s about all the development the movie calls for.
Statham is verging on 60 now, and the fact that he’s been making variations on the same film over and over again carries with it a tinge of melancholy, an awareness that someday, sooner rather than later, he’ll have to stop. It helps that these flicks have all been pretty solid, united in an efficiency of scale and purpose that gives them the spirit of B-movies, even if they aren’t actually that cheap — Mutiny, which takes place primarily on a container ship departing from Bangkok, cost a reported $40 million. The new film, which is less deliriously fun than The Beekeeper while being livelier than Shelter, is more deliberate about doling out the bursts of violence, though when they come, they have a gleeful imagination to them. One of the more memorable instances finds Cole grabbing an open padlock off a door and using it to belt an opponent across the face before hooking the shackle into the dude’s mouth and using it to rip open his cheek. Over the course of the 95-minute run time, Cole will also deploy knives, a fire ax, a fishing spear, various firearms, and his very capable fists to take out foes, but the lock marks a high point in terms of situation-specific ingenuity.
The vessel that Cole ends up on belongs to his boss, Tibu Campallo (Ramon Tikaram), a shipping magnate who’s on the verge of selling his company, KMG, when he’s murdered in an ambush. Cole, who’s blamed for the killing by a nefarious rival CEO with corrupt police connections, traces one of the culprits back to a cargo ship leaving that night and sneaks aboard by way of what can only be described as an “all look the same” joke about white guys. On a parallel path is an amusingly tendriled Annabelle Wallis as the otherwise no-nonsense Angie Ellis, who’s called in at the last minute to fill in as third mate under the sinister-seeming Captain Marko Madsen (Roland Møller). Cole and Angie discover, at almost the same time, that one of the containers is filled with unwilling passengers, some of them children, and that the rest of the crew is in on this human-trafficking operation. They become, with a refreshing ease, allies in what is not so much a mutiny as a hunt-and-destroy operation in which they scurry around the boat, from its engine room to its tower, trying to kill as many people as they can before being captured.
Mutiny is not a deep movie, though it makes no pretenses about having a lot going on. It’s directed by Jean-François Richet, who last headed up the bluntly named 2023 Plane, with Gerard Butler and Mike Colter, and it’s fun to imagine that this is his unofficial answer to the scrapped sequel he was set to produce, and which was going to be titled Ship. But Mutiny is such a Statham project that it’s impossible to imagine it was ever intended for anyone else — just good enough, and just absurd enough, to make an hour and a half melt pleasurably away. Statham’s a pro, whether he’s projecting sadness by turning down the corners of his eyes a little in Cole’s only show of emotion, or having one of many tight-quarters fights between rows of steel boxes or down curving stairwells. When he gets stabbed by a knife at a certain point, he looks only mildly put out to find a blade projecting from his flesh. Does he pull it out and use it against his enemies? Oh, you bet he does! Knowing that Statham can do more than this, that he’s capable of being incredibly funny, doesn’t make what he’s doing in a very narrow range onscreen here any less effective. He’s our journeyman hero, turning up reliably each year when people are in need of an action film that’s just good enough, always ready to do the work.
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