Jason Statham movies don’t exist to be judged with the highfalutin words of fancy movie critics who couldn’t complete a set of five chin-ups even when threatened with death. No, Jason Statham movies don’t even exist to be judged in plain words. They are judged by how loud audience members say “OH!” or “OUCH!” or variations on those exclamations as Jason Statham’s character breaks the arms, twists the necks, and blows the brains out of the various scurvy-looking malefactors that the average scenario of a Jason Statham movie obliges Jason Statham to dispatch. Statham is no longer just a star of reliably bone-crunching action movies, he produces the product as well. While he’s loaned his now-iconic presence to a few franchise movies, Statham is, not to belabor the obvious, a one-man franchise himself.
The story bones of “Mutiny,” written by Lindsey Michel and J.P. Davis, and directed by Jean-François Richet (Davis and Richet were also behind “Plane,” a gnarly actioner starring slightly lesser one-man franchise Gerard Butler), will not be unfamiliar to action picture fans. Statham’s Cole Reed, bodyguard and chauffeur to a kind-hearted Bangkok businessman, is set up to take the fall for the brutal murder of his boss. So aside from the indignity of losing his client, he’s also on the run for a crime he didn’t commit.
Stealing a passport from another follicle-challenged fellow, Cole hops on a container boat owned by his boss’s company. Of course, the trip will not prove uneventful. One-time real-life tough guy Roland Møller is the ship’s corrupt captain, Marko Madsen, and he’s abetting a human trafficking operation on the vessel. Complicating matters is Angie, played by Annabelle Wallis, late of “Malignant” and TV’s “The Tudors.” The shipping company has designated her “third mate” in a last-minute substitution, and while she was looking forward to heading from Bangkok to L.A. to see her of-course-adorable little daughter, she’s told it’s ride-or-get-fired time. Unaware of the nefarious schemes of the captain and his crew, she gets on board, but once she finds out how creepy the creeps she’s working for are, she toggles between resourceful-and-determined-resistor and relatively-helpless-woman-Cole-has-to-protect. (I personally was hoping that they’d Rothrock the character a little more—if you know, you know—but that’s life.)
And if that’s not challenge enough, he has to get the more than a dozen souls who are about to be trafficked to safety somehow. There’s a Navy ship some miles away, and Angie manages to contact it after briefly infiltrating the bridge, but the craft’s captain, played by Adrian Lester, is flummoxed by the situation. Seeing Cole mischaracterized on a television feed, he mutters, “A cop-killing fugitive. Just what this shitstorm needs.”
The ship has a lot of secret compartment and nooks and crannies, so when Cole’s not killing, he’s running, and there’s a bit of business when he gets stuck at the end of a ventilation pipe or something and he has to McGyver his way out of the jam. The tool he uses to unscrew the screen is a part of the Rolex his late boss Tibu gave him at a ceremony just before he was assassinated, and this is the movie’s idea of poignant thematic resonance. It is economical, let’s give it that.
Veteran film editor David Rosenbloom (Mann’s “The Insider,” which we all remember has that great “wipe that smirk off your face” cut), here working with son Joe, makes all the film’s parallel action thread hum with tension. Playing the snickering evil yuppie creep behind the whole thing is Daniel Kluth, who has a slight resemblance to Mathieu Amalric and also can effectively match Amalric’s crazy-eye mode, especially when Cole catches up to him, closing the brackets on the movie’s opening sequence and revealing what we’ve seen in the last tight 95 minutes or so as a flashback.
Not that we’re grading this Jason Statham movie on clever narrative nuances, either. To paraphrase Nicole Kidman, we come here for bone-snapping. And we get it here in abundance.
