Mutiny Review: What A Dull Jason Statham Film!

Mutiny is so painfully predictable that even Jason Statham's trademark mayhem struggles to keep it afloat, groans Sreeju Sudhakaran.

When you go in for a Jason Statham movie, you expect certain things to reliably happen, and in that regard, his new film, Mutiny, ain't at all a disappointment. It perfectly reins in your expectations, ensuring you anticipate absolutely nothing subversive from a movie headlined by The Stat.

You already know he will be playing a character armed with covert ops skills derived from some vague military past. You know he currently or previously worked for a shady organisation that requires those exact skills. And right on cue in the first act, someone closely associated with his workplace, who is close to him like a mentor of sorts, is going to die.

In the case of Mutiny, it is the turn of Tibu Campallo (Ramon Tikaram), a Bangkok-based business magnate who owns a cargo ship company. His head of security is Cole Reed, played by... yes, full marks to ya, Jason Statham. Tibu considers Cole close enough to play chess with and treats him like family, an inner circle otherwise restricted to his son, Cameron (Chaneil Kular).

We get a brief mention of Cole's background and how his father died to save him, but that is just random mush. It hardly matters in a film where The Stat simply goes on his usual grind, taking down baddies to a highly predictable rhythm.

Anyway, despite all his credentials and 'family' status, Cole cannot stop Tibu from getting killed in a surprise ambush.

A Predictable Plot Unfolds

When he discovers that one of the assailants he killed during the defence was part of the crew on one of TIbu's ships, he decides to infiltrate the vessel to find out who ordered the hit.

Possibly as a cheeky reverse-dig at Western racial stereotypes claiming people cannot distinguish one Asian face from another, Cole simply passes himself off as that dead crew member just because he is white. And bald.

Once on board, he discovers the ship's captain is running a human trafficking racket, with captives locked inside one of the cargo containers. Now it is up to him to rescue those captives, aided by a last-minute replacement third mate Angie (Annabelle Wallis).

Like Cole, Angie also has family troubles that make her reluctant to come on board for this new assignment. Once again, this is simply more emotional mush thrown in to give a semblance of texture to a needless role.

There is no way to say this without sounding at least a little bit sexist (and I blame the movie for that), but Angie is merely there so the screenplay can tick off its required female lead slot. If you took her out of the film, absolutely nothing would change. Save for the fact that the runtime might get a little shorter.

Her one slight redeeming quality is that she does not need Statham to come to her rescue every single time. She can manage to escape on her own. She can also manage to get caught on her own.

Lacklustre Characters

Mutiny is directed by Jean-François Richet, who previously helmed the Gerard Butler action-thriller Plane. While that was a surprisingly enjoyable romp, Mutiny is as dull and cumbersome as they come, even with its mercifully short 95-minute runtime.

The plot is generic with a capital G. The Stat goes on a revenge mission to kill his employer's assassins, and he successfully does just that with only a few minor skirmishes.

There is a certain Die Hard vibe to it, and if I did not love that Bruce Willis classic so much, I would have called this Die Hard On A Ship. Oh wait, we already had a Die Hard On A Ship in Under Siege, didn't we?

Speaking of Under Siege, the 1992 film remains one of Steven Seagal's best movies (aside from Executive Decision), and one of the major reasons for that was Tommy Lee Jones playing a gloriously scenery-chewing villain.

Even the original Die Hard was memorable precisely because Hans Gruber, played so iconically by the late Alan Rickman, was so ruthlessly good as an antagonist.

Mutiny's villain Marko, played by Danish actor Roland Møller, is bland and unforgivably boring. He just barks orders, shoots a few bullets, and then gets into a brutal final fight with the hero where the outcome is as painfully predictable as Mr Statham's next generic comeback.

There are a couple of other minor villain characters too, and there is also this 'shock' reveal about a secondary character that is as surprising as Jason Statham saying 'vengeance' at least once in any of his movies.

Funnily enough, last week's Bollywood release, Awarapan 2, featured a very similar crime setup and familial conflict.

Boring Action

This, let's just call it 'wannabe Die Hard on a Cargo Ship', also fails to make good use of its location. Setting the action inside a shipping vessel certainly keeps things contained, but it never gives the viewer a proper sense of spatial context to understand where the characters are in relation to the people hunting them.

It simply shifts our hero from one steel box to another, placing mild roadblocks for him to easily clear before serving up more generic villains to shoot, maim and kill.

Some of the kills are undeniably brutal, like a knife stabbed through the cheeks or a man harpooned right through the forehead. However, the action choreography completely matches the movie's utter lack of ambition to achieve anything beyond the ordinary.

That, weighed further down by stilted performances and painfully generic dialogue, makes Mutiny one of the most monotonous movies to ever star Jason Statham, even by the standards of his never-changing formula book.

Let's get him back to hunting megalodons in the seas, please! Not that the Meg movies are good, but there is some ridiculous fun to watch Statham impale a prehistoric shark with a helicopter blade than any moment in this boring thriller.