By the early ’90s, it had become clear that “Die Hard” was the most paradigmatic thriller of its era, imitated in scores of knockoffs that kept the spirit but changed the locale. Thus, we got “Die Hard on a Plane” (“Passenger 57,” “Air Force One”), “Die Hard on a Bus” (“Speed”), “Die Hard on a Train” (“Under Siege 2: Dark Territory”), “Die Hard in the White House” (“Olympus Has Fallen”), and the one that finally ran the cycle aground — “Die Hard on a Boat,” which served the first “Under Siege” well enough but stalled the overblown, too-slow-for-speed “Speed 2: Cruise Control.”
But “Mutiny,” a revenge thriller set aboard a giant cargo ship, shows you that there’s life in the “Die Hard on a Boat” concept. The film makes you think of Bruce Willis in other ways too, since its star, Jason Statham, boasts a macho chrome dome and offs his enemies with a blithe viciousness that evokes Willis at his ruthless best.
From Sly and Arnold to “John Wick,” mano-a-mano fight scenes in movies tend to revel in their showdown-to-the-death choreography, the more elaborate the better. “Mutiny” 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.
With bring-the-pain timing, he smashes heads and snaps arms and uses whatever cutting tools are available, at one point ripping a foe’s cheek with the hook of an open lock; moments later, when he jabs a dagger deeper into that same wound, it’s 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’t waste a homicidal movement. Yet it all feels brutally spontaneous. At one point he smashes the thug he’s 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 “Die Easy.”
In the film’s 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’s a major conspiracy. (Is Tibu’s 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’s there that he discovers an ever darker conspiracy, in the form of a shipping container that’s full of desperate human cargo from Thailand, most of them children.
That feels like a lift from Angel Studios, but in its way it enriches the revenge plot. Cole isn’t just getting even — he’s saving the world from some very sick evil. His ally is Angie (Annabelle Wallis), the ship’s third mate, who’s an embattled innocent in all this. His antagonist is Marko, the ship’s captain, an amusingly middle-aged European bruiser played by the Danish actor Roland Møller in tattoos and an elegant beard, with an accent that’s a little bit Arnold, a little bit this-is-Matthias-Schoenaerts-in-15-years. He’s no Alan Rickman, but he’ll do.
“Mutiny” was directed by Jean-François Richet, who made the pretty good Gerard Butler movie “Plane,” 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’s producers, and you can tell that he wants you to feel each smashed limb and gunshot to the face. The ship’s crew members are anonymous enough, yet each killing is staged as an instant execution. It’s not that the violence is shocking — it’s that Jason Statham means it. (He’s 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’s all in the timing — the rhythm of revenge murder that’s perfect, because it’s done by any means necessary. Jason Statham is keeping that dream alive.
