MUTINY

Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

Jason Statham and Gerard Butler should get together and do a movie about a survivalist ex-military man seeking vengeance against terrorists in the middle of a natural disaster. These guys have never worked together, but they have worked with multiple same directors: Ric Roman Waugh (Greenland, Shelter); Jean-François Richet (Plane, Mutiny). So what are they waiting for?

The idiocy of Greenland: Migration (also directed by Waugh) notwithstanding, I seem to have a thing for these guys’ movies—quite literal B-movies in every respect, I tend to give them solid B grades (spoiler alert: it’s what I give Mutiny), because they are exactly what they state themselves to be, and thus solidly deliver on expectations. Mutiny is merely the latest in a line of these, the second by Statham this year alone, after Shelter. Last year we got A Working Man (the weakest of this recent stretch—not quite a B for that one); the year before that, the one that launched this stretch of Statham movies and still my favorite (albeit also getting a solid B): The Beekeeper.

I do wish the rest of these movies were more like The Beekeeper: self-aware, sprinkled with effective humor, leaning into its own preposterousness. I liked Mutiny a bit more than I expected, but was still slightly disappointed at its self-seriousness. We’re all here to see Jason Statham shoot a bunch of bad guys in the head, I get it, but would it hurt to make it a little more fun? I guess Statham is just cranking these out for a regular paycheck, and I don’t begrudge him that. I suppose my plea is more for the directors and writers. Beekeeper writer Kurt Wimmer has not written any of these other movies, and someone needs to pick up the phone and call him again. Apparently he wrote The Beekeeper 2, coming out next year, so that’s promising, at least.

As for Mutiny, I’ll give Jean-François Richet credit for pacing, and maybe most surprising of all, restraint. There is plenty of engaging action in this movie, but it’s not wall-to-wall with it; we actually get some semblance of a story. Statham’s ex-cop, Cole Reed, has been working for shipping company magnate Tibu Campallo (Ramon Tikaram) for five years, and they’ve become close friends. Reed is even declared “family” by Campallo, who is retiring and handing the company off to his son, Kameron Campallo (Chaneil Kular). While Reed is driving Tibu home, they are ambushed—the first exciting action sequence in the film—and the rest of the film follows Reed’s quest for vengeance against the perpetrators.

Most of this happens on a container ship, making Mutiny feel like Captain Phillips if it were a dumb action movie. It’s not like we’ve never seen action sequences among shipping containers before, but having it be the setting of three quarters of the movie does lend it a small bit of novelty. We also get one female lead, Angie Ellis (Annabelle Wallis), a KMG employee forced to report to this ship at the last minute who is evidently the only crew member not in on the whole human trafficking scheme that is ultimately revealed. As the sole female principal cast member, Mutiny is far from passing the Bechdel test, but I’ll give the movie points for not putting romance anywhere in the story, and for making Ellis herself an ex-Navy woman who is more than capable and never needs saving.

So really, we get to watch Statham and Wallis kick a bunch of guys’ asses for a bit more than an hour, all on a container ship. It’s what I expected from this movie, it’s what I wanted, and it’s what it gave me. There’s also the primary villain in the ship’s captain, Marko Madsen (Roland Møller), who might be taking orders from a guy orchestrating all this, but he’s also the guy we all know Statham will have a final, climactic square-off with. Sure, this could just be called “Die Hard on a container ship,” but formulas are followed because they work.

It’s when people try to get too cute or complicated with formulas when they stop working. That’s where these movies smartly refuse to go. They are clearly mid-tier, mid-budget, and employ mid-level movie stars, but a movie like Mutiny is truly making the most of what it has to work with, sometimes slightly clever with its action sequences but never getting out over its skis with that cleverness. Statham’s final hand-to-hand battle is not wildly inventive, but is just inventive enough, as with the rest of the movie, to keep you inching closer to the edge of your seat. It’s why I keep going to these movies, even though they aren’t great—they’re not just good enough, but consistently so. If “working class action” is its own subgenre, Jason Statham was born to play in it.

Okay, fine: this makes her look like a woman in need of protecting. Blame the people who selected available screen shots! These two are equally capable of kicking ass, take my word for it.

Overall: B