Everyone would have gone to see this if it was called
The Revenge of Boaty McBoatface!
dir: Jean-François Richet
2026
So often we wish the world to be how we would wish it to be, and not how it actually is. That unfairness sometimes drives us mad.
A few years ago this director directed a movie. It was called Plane. Much of the film was set on a plane, and the resolution of the movie was all the characters involved getting back on the plane and flying away from a nasty situation.
Everyone mocked the makers for being so painfully literal. Being the sheep that I am I mocked them too. “What’s the movie called?” “Plane”. “What’s it about?” “A plane”.
Brilliant. He, being this director, was making another film about or set around another form of transportation. It was going to be called, I am not lying, Ship.
Ship. How perfect would that have been…
But no. They chickened out. The fucking cowards. They called it Mutiny instead.
This is a betrayal of the ‘literal title in moviemaking’ ethos. They’ve betrayed us all.
And there’s no mutiny in the whole movie so the title is meaningless, but I’m not here to be pedantic, I’m here to be petty, instead. It’s far more entertaining (for me).
Mutiny is the most recent in a long line of action movies that come out once or twice a year where Jason Statham plays an ex something or other who’s forced to kill a bunch of people in order to balance out the unfairness of the world. Increasingly, like everything the Israeli government does, it comes across as way, way out of proportion. So the instigating event is that ‘they’, the baddies, kill the employer of the character Statham plays, called Cole (I kid you not), and Cole must get revenge on them.
For that one death he immediately kills, I dunno, five people who were involved? One of them, conveniently, was a bald chap, so Cole assumes his identity, or at least uses his credentials, to get onto a boat where that chap worked when he wasn’t assassinating rich people.
They do take their time to get us to know that Cole really cared about his employer, and his employer, Tibu (Ramon Tikaram) really cared about him. We know he considered him family, and, dare I say it, loved him, because he gives him a really expensive Rolex watch as a gift.
I’m not saying Rolex paid for product placement in this movie, but I’m not not saying that either. I wouldn’t have thought they’d need the extra cash, since they made $11 billion in sales last year, but if I told you that the fucking watch plays a crucial role at a key moment in the film, you’d call me a fucking liar to my face, and it would be wrong of you to do so.
Because it happens, oh yes it happens. On the Ship.
The Ship. Shippy McShip. Boaty McBoatface. Cole sneaks onto the boat looking for answers and for more people to kill to avenge his employer. Because it’s not a normal boat with a normal crew, and instead has a crew of nasty people onboard, all the way up to and including the captain, Cole has free licence to kill all of them, apparently.
Cargo ship of that size has about 20 crew, and Cole / Statham will kickpunch and punchkick and eventually shoot or stab all of them. The one person he can’t kill is a third mate who conveniently isn’t part of this crew, but is there so that Cole has someone to talk to. They both, independently, find that the secret cargo on this ship, like Soylent Green, is actually people.
People. As in, this evil boat crew aren’t people smugglers; they’re human traffickers, as in, so-called modern slavery.
Boo. Kill them even quicker, Jason Statham!
This flick isn’t reinventing movies, let alone Jason Statham movies, so it does what you’d expect, with Statham maintaining one grim facial expression (he smiles twice in the movie, and both times it looks painful), as he sneaks around every corner of the boat killing crew members when he can.
None of the crew stand out, really, except for the captain, who looks like he’s wired in some way, like Statham stole his meth stash and now it’s personal. So we’re waiting for two things: for Statham to kill everyone, and whether he will do so before the boat sinks or the American navy get there.
Why are there Americans policing the high seas? I have no idea, both in real life and the context of this movie, and while I do know a tiny bit about how America interjects itself into almost every conflict in order to make things better for all concerned (every history book backs this up), what they’re doing in this movie is a complete mystery to everyone expect possibly Statham and his blonde second-in-command (Annabelle Wallis), who seem to really rely on them.
“What are the Americans thinking? What are the Americans doing? Do you think they like these pants I’m wearing?”
It’s pretty obvious what kind of flick I’m describing, as in, mostly mindless action, but I guess what I should be talking about is how it is, as in, what’s it like? If you enjoyed watching Statham kill people, in short, energetic bursts filmed mostly in close up, then this flick has several scenes of him doing that. While the flick maintains some of its tension with this somewhat claustrophobic environment, and how Cole works his way around it, in what amounts to being a far less charismatic or enjoyable Die Hard on a Boat, it amounts to watching Statham grimly work his way around and through gangways, staircases and pipes for 80% of the running time.
This is not a film we are watching for dialogue. The dialogue in this, as you would expect, is formulaic to the point of sounding like an IKEA furniture catalogue. In fact if they’d read out sections from the magazine I would have enjoyed it slightly more.
They’ve got some really neat products, them Swedes.
I can’t say that I enjoy watching people die, but I probably enjoy it more than I do watching Statham half-arsing his way through dialogue about another character’s daughter and how much he wants her photo to be reunited with her mother. Oh, have no fear, people who don’t exist, I will do my utmost to make sure you spend time more together again, one day.
If there is a saving grace to the flick, is that it’s mostly straight ahead, and gets where it’s going (Statham triumphant, all enemies dead at his feet) in economical fashion. It doesn’t linger long over 90 minutes.
As yet another recent annual entry in Stathamness, I would put it slightly above A Working Man, and slightly below The Beekeeper, which was insane, and Shelter, which at least generated something of a caring relationship between Cole/Levon/Clay/Mason/whatever he was called and the child he was protecting from the evil British government, or from Bill Nighy personally. I fully admit that parsing gradations between the minutiae in action flicks that are built to be indistinguishable from the last one that came out is an exercise in futility, but at least it keeps me busy.
5 times and to think of how funny Statham was decades ago in those early flicks he bothered to act in like Lock Stock or Snatch out of 10
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“We’ve got a problem on the ship” – of course you do, his name is Statham - Mutiny
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