2026 / Dir. Jean-François Richet
Rating: 2.5/5
Watch if: Your dad calls you up asking if you’ve seen some show on Amazon Prime or Paramount Plus that you’ve never heard of. This movie is for him.
Spoiler alert: there is no mutiny in Mutiny. Plane director Jean-François Richet also foolishly misses the opportunity to call this Boat, thus setting up a whole series of transportation-related mediocre action films. Train, Minivan, Hot Air Balloon, Boat 2: Water Taxi. We could have had it all.
A couple of fun, brutal action scenes keep Mutiny watchable at minimum. It’s clear at nearly 60 years old that Statham can’t do the crazy stunts anymore, so Mutiny focuses on quick, raw fights. In one, Statham wields an open padlock to a goon’s cheek, then sticks a knife through the wound, and finishes off the guy with a gun. During the final fight, fire axes and fish hooks appear. At best, these seem influenced by the truly exciting Indonesian fight choreography that kicked off in The Raid (evidence: Statham brought in The Night Comes for US director Timo Tjahjanto for next year’s Beekeeper 2).
Too bad that the fights here are few and far between. Instead of fighting and action set pieces, Statham runs around a cargo freighter’s corridors, climbs ladders, and goes down exhaust vents. Exciting stuff.
You don’t come to these movies either for Statham to deliver an emotionally raw performance full of gripping plot twists and turns, but without much action, your attention is drawn to just how phoned-in this movie feels. Statham’s character, Cole Reed, has the thinnest of backstories, and his motivation for being on a cargo freighter is to get revenge for the death of his billionaire boss (no wonder Jeff Bezos leaked this on Amazon Prime). There’s a human trafficking subplot too that would feel gross and exploitative for how it uses the non-white actors if the whole movie wasn’t so lazy that everything feels like the bare minimum or an afterthought.
Elsewhere, Annabelle Wallis (Peaky Blinders, Malignant) is there to play the “woman in action man movie” who has a daughter she misses and reads her lines like she just started acting the day this movie started. Roland Møller (A Hijacking, Atomic Blonde) looks like he’d rather be taking a nap than play the human trafficker cargo ship captain. At least Adrian Lester (Mary Queen of Scots, The Sandman) knows what he’s supposed to do as a Navy commander: deliver every line of exposition incredulously over the top, like he’s just heard the twist of a Christopher Nolan movie.
If only the rest of the cast could have at least made this cheesy and dumb as hell, instead of bored and just there to cash a check. So, other than a couple gnarly deaths, there’s really nothing here. Instead, go stream The Furious, another action movie with a human trafficking plotline that happens to be the best action movie of the decade.
Leave a Reply