‘Mutiny’ is a goofy Jason Statham thriller that’s exactly what you’re looking for

For its first 20 minutes and its last ten, Mutiny is a corporate thriller about a shipping company merger and a dastardly plot to stop it through an assassination attempt on the CEO.

But for the hour in between, Mutiny is a completely different movie: Die Hard on a Cargo Ship, with Jason Statham going toe-to-toe with a crew full of human traffickers and kicking all their asses, one by one.

Sure, it’s somewhat ridiculous, there are plenty of glaring plot holes, and the film treats the subject of human trafficking with just as much callousness as most movies about the topic do.

But as long as it’s about Statham fighting bad guys at sea, Mutiny is a hoot.

Statham plays Cole Reed, who, like nearly all Statham characters, is a British military veteran who later became a London cop; the movie gives him a backstory involving his father’s death that it doesn’t even begin to care about.

As the film begins, Cole is in Bangkok, working in private security as the bodyguard for a benevolent billionaire shipping tycoon, who’s preparing to sell his company and retire. However, shadowy villains conspire to block the merger, assassinate the CEO, and pin the crime on Statham.

So, everybody’s favorite 59-year-old commando slips out of Thailand aboard one of the company’s ships, which it turns out is operating a human trafficking ring. It’s up to Cole and the one other non-villain on board, a shipping company functionary played by Annabelle Wallis, to stop them through a series of hand-to-hand fights. (Like Gerard Butler in Plane — which comes from the same director — Wallis is just trying to get home to her beloved little daughter.)

Mutiny gives the same treatment to trafficking that most movies these days do- it introduces the trafficking victims when they’re discovered in a large shipping container, and occasionally puts them in danger, while keeping them offscreen for long stretches and never really much caring about them as characters. (See this summer’s Supergirl, which established that the villain was a trafficker, but treated as something of a secondary crime, when his real misdeed was poisoning the dog.)

Aside from that, the time spent on the ship is the movie’s best stretch. The film makes great use of enclosed spaces, tunnels, and various shipping implements for some very creative fight choreography. When it comes to making the best use of Statham’s talents, French director Jean-François Richet isn’t quite a Guy Ritchie, but he’s an improvement over David Ayer.

At the same time, there’s a U.S. Navy ship nearby that keeps answering the calls from the main ship, and it’s captained by Adrian Lester, from the movie version of Primary Colors. I kept wondering what the Navy ship’s plot function would be, but it leads to a punchline that I’m still not sure was supposed to be as funny as I thought.

Yes, there are some pretty glaring plot holes, starting with why the CEO’s murder would be needed to stop the merger. But again, if you’re going to see a movie in mid-August, starring Jason Statham kicking ass on a ship, from the director of Plane, you’re probably not there for plot verisimilitude.