Director: Jean-François Richet
Cast: Jason Statham, Annabelle Wallis, Roland Møller, Adrian Lester
Screenplay: Lindsay Michel, J.P. Davis
95 mins. Rated R for strong/bloody violence, and language.

All film exists on a spectrum, sometimes through genre or filmmaker, but Jason Statham (much like fellow one-man army Gerard Butler) has his own scale with which all films are based. Mutiny, the most recent Statham vehicle, has been advertised as a Die Hard-adjacent film, and it’s certainly one of the better Statham films of late, though that isn’t a tall order.

Statham (Snatch) plays Cole Reed, security for a billionaire businessman. When he is ambushed and his boss killed, Cole is the prime suspect, and he tracks the responsible parties to a container ship leaving that very night. He teams up with the ship’s third mate, played by Annabelle Wallis (X-Men: First Class), and together they try to uncover who on the ship is responsible for his boss’s death…and why.

My biggest criticism of a number of these types of action films is that they often play very much by the numbers, and Mutiny is no such exception. In fact, the biggest surprise of the film is the lack of an actual mutiny. Unfortunate titling aside, this is a story that is paint-by-numbers, all twists and turns telegraphed to the point that when a late-stage reveal occurs, I realized that I had assumed it was public knowledge before noting that I had just assumed it would be happen eventually.

Now, like comedy and horror, if an action film can accomplish its most basic goal, then it’s a success, right? If it has good action, then that can make up for a lot of problems. The action in Mutiny is better than in films like A Working Man or Shelter, due to some close-quarter combat in confined spaces like between or inside shipping containers or small cabins and such. It’s not great action (outside of an excellent gangplank set piece near the film’s conclusion), but it’s better than recent Statham efforts.

I also appreciate that Annabelle Wallis isn’t playing a typical damsel in distress role, though it almost seems like it at first. She’s a lot stronger than the initial setup would have you believe, and Statham and Wallis have solid camaraderie throughout.

Beyond all that, the script is okay at the start but eventually devolves into a laughable conclusion. Roland Møller (Atomic Blonde) does the best he can as the ship’s captain, but the screenplay doesn’t give him much to work with. There is also a Navy vessel subplot that makes some serious logic leaps, and the dialogue in the final act is ludicrous and unintentionally silly. There are times that Mutiny is really firing along, but it’s final few scenes really drag the proceedings down a few notches.

Mutiny is…fine. For fans of Statham’s recent work, this is solid enough to get by, but I don’t think it’s up to the standards of modern action films, and the action is sometimes great, but not altogether throughout. It’s a serviceable thriller that kind of makes me want to see a post-credits scene where we learn that all these disparate Statham characters are actually the same person. That would be enough to spark my curiosity enough to revisit. Die Hard is a high bar, but this one misses that mark.

2½/5
-Kyle A. Goethe