Mutiny review: New Jason Statham action film leaves audience with the illusion of action
Directed by Jean-François Richet, Mutiny races along like a speedboat across 95 breathless minutes, but there’s little that sets it apart from the dozens of other action movies that Statham churns out on an annual basis. Indeed, Mutiny is a lot like an extended level of a Hitman video game, played by a child who has no interest in stealth, but would rather complete the mission with brute force.
Jason Statham's dialogue in Mutiny is restricted to stern instructions, grave observations and the odd pearl of wisdom delivered, characteristically, like a threat.
A week after Emraan Hashmi utilised visa-free entry privileges in Thailand (in last week’s Bollywood release Awarapan 2), it’s Jason Statham’s turn. What’s more unexpected is that Statham’s new movie, Mutiny, has essentially the same plot as that of Awarapan 2 — minus the songs of yearning, of course. Both films involve unpredictable scions of Bangkok businessmen, women and children in need of rescuing and a spunky heroine who teams up with the protagonist. Unfortunately for Statham, his new film is as disposable as its Bollywood counterpart.
Directed by Jean-François Richet, Mutiny races along like a speedboat across 95 breathless minutes, but there’s little that sets it apart from the dozens of other action movies that Statham churns out on an annual basis.
Here, he plays an ex-soldier named Cole Reed, now a bodyguard to a Thai shipping magnate. When the two are ambushed on a Bangkok alleyway and Cole’s boss is killed in cold blood, the vengeful veteran goes on the hunt for the perpetrators. His two-minute investigation leads him to one of his crime boss’ ships, where he stumbles upon a clandestine human trafficking operation. Was that why his boss — Cole used to think of him as a father figure — murdered?
A cat-and-mouse game
Having promised the poor prisoners that he would rescue them, Cole becomes involved in a cat-and-mouse game as a stowaway aboard the ship. He scurries from one hiding place to the next, hunted by the ship’s crooked captain and a crew of mercenaries. But there’s one crew member who wasn’t supposed to be onboard — a young woman named Angie, played by Annabelle Wallis.
We know that Angie is a sympathetic character because she wants to be with her daughter back in Los Angeles and not with a group of gruff men aboard a ship that she doesn’t know is being used for nefarious purposes. It doesn’t take Cole and Angie too long to cross paths and team up.
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Statham plays uncomplicated men; that’s the charm he brings to his movies. “Trust me,” is all he needs to say to Angie for them to partner up. A genre unto himself, the action star has no need for conventional tactics such as words of affirmation or quality time. He’s an act of service kind of person if there ever was one. “Trust me,” he growls, and we—the lovers he’s wooing—are right there by his side, like Angie.
Unfolding almost entirely aboard the ship, Mutiny borrows liberally from the gold standard of contained action-thrillers, Die Hard. No one, however, would ever mistake the famously stoic Statham for the wisecracking Bruce Willis. His dialogue in Mutiny is restricted to stern instructions, grave observations and the odd pearl of wisdom delivered, characteristically, like a threat.
Extended Hitman video game
Unlike the 2021 movie Wrath of Man, which remains the sole outlier in Statham’s recent filmography for taking a conventionally economical narrative and elevating it into biblical grandiosity, Mutiny is just thinly written.
For instance, it's barely an action movie at all. Instead, it leaves the viewer with the illusion of action. Here’s what that means: virtually every character in Mutiny is armed to the teeth, but they use their weapons only in short bursts. This leaves you with empty visuals of gun-toting men, but not enough actual gunfire. The plot, what little of it there is, is tense and tightly wound. While this gives the impression of a ticking clock, there’s little urgency to the proceedings because Statham’s acting range is limited to degrees of stone-faced rage.
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Like Awarapan 2, however, Mutiny cannot be faulted for laziness. It’s a handsome-looking production with a keen sense of geography; you could be disengaged from the drama, but you’re never lost at sea. The movie effectively communicates where all the chess pieces are at any given moment, which isn’t an easy thing to accomplish when the action is restricted to a single location.
Extra points to Richet for not shooting against a green screen, because if there’s anything that Christopher Nolan has taught us, it’s that there’s an immersive tactility to real-life sets.
In that regard, Mutiny is a lot like an extended level of a Hitman video game, played by a child who has no interest in stealth, but would rather complete the mission with brute force. Fans of the Hitman games would know that this inelegant approach leads to a lower score than you’d earn if you got the job done gracefully. But expecting elegance and grace from a Jason Statham movie is like expecting Tiger Shroff to keep his feet firmly on the ground throughout one of his films.
