The dog days of August have already seen the trotting out of some usual suspects from a junky Eli Roth horror to a belated nostalgia comedy sequel to a Mike Pence-approved Ronald Reagan drama. This weekend, yet more howls will be heard in cinemas with a lower-tier horror instalment and an even lower-tier girlies on tour comedy being shuffled out. It’s all amounting to a rather rubbishy end to what’s been a pretty remarkable summer (easily the biggest since the pandemic), allowing for Spider-Man supremacy until September slowly returns the industry from the D-list closer to the A.
There can still be low-level popcorn pleasures to be had in August. Last weekend’s throwback dino caper The End of Oak Street was a B-movie made with just the right balance of serious to silly while last year Zach Cregger gifted us Weapons, the rare genre film to end up winning an Oscar. Trophies are unlikely for this weekend’s other medium-sized release Mutiny (if only the Blockbuster Entertainment Awards hadn’t died off at the turn of the 2000s) but if the words “Jason Statham vehicle” possess a safe, soothing quality then there are far worse ways to spend a Saturday night.
The actor occupies a rarefied space in a genre that now mostly exists far away from the big screen, pushed back toward the contemporary equivalent of the DVD bargain bin. Outside of the superhero world or some other more fantastical setting, the action movie has struggled at the box office, at least domestically (it remains easily sellable overseas). Without a generation of younger stars taking on impossible missions, it’s been left to the older guard to kick, shoot and try not to keel over, an ever-decreasing squad which is now led by Gerard Butler and Statham (Liam Neeson’s action movie overkill means they barely get released these days). Both have managed to stay working above the glut of even lower-rent, straight-to-streaming titles and they can still manage to attract a decent-sized audience, usually in January or August, kings of the dumping months.
For his latest Statham has borrowed Jean-François Richet, the French director of Butler’s 2023 hit Plane, a film I found personally disappointing for its unforgivably small amount of actual plane. That film was supposed to be followed by Ship (I kid you not) but reportedly, Butler dropped out just two weeks before production and it was canned. Perhaps the deposit for the ship had already been paid as it’s hard not to see how Mutiny isn’t what that film ultimately morphed into, another by-the-book tale of a hero striking back at crooks, also sharing the same co-writer. If Plane suffered from not enough plane then Mutiny keeps us satisfyingly with ship for almost the entirety as Statham’s ex-cop turned bodyguard cons his away on to a cargo voyage to find out who is behind the murder of his billionaire boss.
Perhaps there’s something slightly more charming about the existence of a sturdy and unpretentious formula-first actioner like Mutiny just because it’s that much less common to see a film like this actually reach the big screen in 2026. It also helps that by this stage Statham knows how to go through the motions but doesn’t seem to sleepwalk through them just yet. His line reading can be stiff and hammy but that only adds to the charm while as an action star he is never less than physically persuasive. Richet is as competent as the film requires, efficiently staging tightly restricted fisticuffs in-between storage containers and throwing in some gloriously gory embellishments (who knew a padlock could be so gruesomely useful?) but it’s all rather plain and workmanlike (as a Statham director, Richet is very much not Guy Ritchie). So very much of Mutiny is just exactly what one expects without any added seasoning, no emotional reaction or character motivation or plot twist bringing us to a place we didn’t expect to be.
Which means that of course, Statham teams up with an attractive blond woman, played by Annabelle Wallis as a single mother turned feisty third mate (her character has a “deadbeat ex and the most wonderful little girl in the world” naturally) and of course they’re also trying to save a container of Thai refugees at the same time for maximum goodness and of course, the big reveal at the end is one that we worked out in the very first scene (although admittedly, I wasn’t as prepared for two small roles for White Lotus season three actors, sadly not including Parker Posey). It feels like something you might have half-seen before and for the meantime, it’s likely to be something you’ll half-see again. The action genre is undoubtedly in need of new tricks but until they come, films like Mutiny offer a modestly entertaining reminder of what the old dogs can still do.
Mutiny is out in Australian cinemas on 20 August and in the US and UK on 21 August
