I love Jason Statham movies. It started for me around the time of Homefront and had me frantically mining into his filmography and catching each new release.

The trailer for Mutiny looked great. A kinetic montage with Statham using several implements within his fight scenes. These seemed to escalate in their gratuity and the amount of damage they could cause. It ends with Our Jase using a harpoon. Yes, a harpoon.

But does the actual movie live up to the trailer? The official plot line goes- ‘Framed for the murder of his billionaire boss, a vengeful man uncovers an international conspiracy as he battles a gang of thugs aboard a cargo ship.’

The fight scenes are every bit as good as the snippets in the trailer. They’re brilliantly directed and indeed, utilise implements in the same way Jason Voorhees would. But there’s only one catch. There aren’t enough of them. The fights make up about 15 minutes of the runtime. The rest of the film involves the dull as ditchwater setting up of the thinnest of plots and characters hiding and running away from others on the actual vessel.

There was a great first scene on the liner which reminded me of the menacing claustrophobia onboard the Nostromo in Alien but this wasn’t fully explored or exploited.

It was as if there was a production meeting in which it was decided to have really great fight scenes but then they’d worry about plot, character, pacing and the generation of suspense later but then forgot to have a follow up meeting after this.

A word about the films wardrobe. Jason wears a denim jacket and baseball cap just like in Homefront. I looked online and some of the merch launched for Mutiny is an official clothing line inspired by what Statham wears here. This reminds me of the order form I once saw inserted into an original vinyl copy of the soundtrack of the 70’s flick The Stud. You could buy official ‘Stud’ aftershave and smell just like Oliver Tobias in the film. Genius.

Mutiny suffers from too few fight scenes, and too much cinematic padding/word salad.

2 out of 5 stars