{"id":863949,"date":"2026-08-19T16:36:09","date_gmt":"2026-08-19T16:36:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/863949\/"},"modified":"2026-08-19T16:36:09","modified_gmt":"2026-08-19T16:36:09","slug":"mutiny-review-jason-statham-dies-hard-on-a-cargo-ship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/863949\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Mutiny’ Review: Jason Statham Dies Hard on a Cargo Ship"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tBy the early \u201990s, it had become clear that \u201cDie Hard<\/a>\u201d was the most paradigmatic thriller of its era, imitated in scores of knockoffs that kept the spirit but changed the locale. Thus, we got \u201cDie Hard on a Plane\u201d (\u201cPassenger 57,\u201d \u201cAir Force One\u201d), \u201cDie Hard on a Bus\u201d (\u201cSpeed\u201d), \u201cDie Hard on a Train\u201d (\u201cUnder Siege 2: Dark Territory\u201d), \u201cDie Hard in the White House\u201d (\u201cOlympus Has Fallen\u201d), and the one that finally ran the cycle aground \u2014 \u201cDie Hard on a Boat,\u201d which served the first \u201cUnder Siege\u201d well enough but stalled the overblown, too-slow-for-speed \u201cSpeed 2: Cruise Control.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBut \u201cMutiny<\/a>,\u201d a revenge thriller set aboard a giant cargo ship, shows you that there\u2019s life in the \u201cDie Hard on a Boat\u201d concept. The film makes you think of Bruce Willis in other ways too, since its star, Jason Statham<\/a>, boasts a macho chrome dome and offs his enemies with a blithe viciousness that evokes Willis at his ruthless best.<\/p>\n

\n\tFrom Sly and Arnold to \u201cJohn Wick,\u201d mano-a-mano fight scenes in movies tend to revel in their showdown-to-the-death choreography, the more elaborate the better. \u201cMutiny\u201d is different. The killings happen as fast as Cole Reed (Statham), a fallen-London-cop-turned-bodyguard out to avenge the murder of his Bangkok tycoon boss, can make them happen.<\/p>\n

\n\tWith bring-the-pain timing, he smashes heads and snaps arms and uses whatever cutting tools are available, at one point ripping a foe\u2019s cheek with the hook of an open lock; moments later, when he jabs a dagger deeper into that same wound, it\u2019s the essence of efficiency. Cole, who has to maneuver his way around 20 savage crew members, each of whom will need to be killed, doesn\u2019t waste a homicidal movement. Yet it all feels brutally spontaneous. At one point he smashes the thug he\u2019s holding, pauses to machine-gun another, coldcocks the original guy, then guns down two more, all in the space of nine seconds. The way Statham works, we should call this \u201cDie Easy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the film\u2019s opening half hour, set in the luxe steel-and-marble corporate echelons of Bangkok, Tibu Campallo (Ramon Tikaram), the worldly but now retiring Thai shipping-magnate boss Cole has become close to (the two love their chess games), celebrates the sale of his company, though a traitor within has other plans. As Cole is driving Tibu back from a passing-of-the-torch party, the two are ambushed, and Tibu is killed. The cops are in on it; it\u2019s a major conspiracy. (Is Tibu\u2019s ingenuous son, played by Chaneil Kular, in on it too? The film keeps you guessing.) Cole sneaks his way aboard the Artemis, the cargo ship on which one of the conspirators is set to make his escape, and it\u2019s there that he discovers an ever darker conspiracy, in the form of a shipping container that\u2019s full of desperate human cargo from Thailand, most of them children.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat feels like a lift from Angel Studios, but in its way it enriches the revenge plot. Cole isn\u2019t just getting even \u2014 he\u2019s saving the world from some very sick evil. His ally is Angie (Annabelle Wallis), the ship\u2019s third mate, who\u2019s an embattled innocent in all this. His antagonist is Marko, the ship\u2019s captain, an amusingly middle-aged European bruiser played by the Danish actor Roland M\u00f8ller in tattoos and an elegant beard, with an accent that\u2019s a little bit Arnold, a little bit this-is-Matthias-Schoenaerts-in-15-years. He\u2019s no Alan Rickman, but he\u2019ll do.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cMutiny\u201d was directed by Jean-Fran\u00e7ois Richet, who made the pretty good Gerard Butler movie \u201cPlane,\u201d and here, once again, he shows a flair for staging extreme misanthropic violence with a human touch. Richet turns the ship into an enthralling character, with its pipes and catwalks and tunnels and tubes, some of which become weaponry. Statham is one of the film\u2019s producers, and you can tell that he wants you to feel each smashed limb and gunshot to the face. The ship\u2019s crew members are anonymous enough, yet each killing is staged as an instant execution. It\u2019s not that the violence is shocking \u2014\u00a0it\u2019s that Jason Statham means it. (He\u2019s a true actor of action.) At the preview showing I attended, people near me were laughing at the killings, something I almost never do, but at the climax, when Cole reached for a harpoon gun and used it, I had to give in and chuckle myself. It\u2019s all in the timing \u2014 the rhythm of revenge murder that\u2019s perfect, because it\u2019s done by any means necessary. Jason Statham is keeping that dream alive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By the early \u201990s, it had become clear that \u201cDie Hard\u201d was the most paradigmatic thriller of its…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":863950,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,2400,75,87074,337,110560],"class_list":["post-863949","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-die-hard","tag-entertainment","tag-jason-statham","tag-movies","tag-mutiny"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/863949","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=863949"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/863949\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/863950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=863949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=863949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=863949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}