Jason Statham in Mutiny. Photograph: Dan Smith/Lionsgate View image in fullscreen Jason Statham in Mutiny. Photograph: Dan Smith/Lionsgate Jason Statham Review Mutiny review – Jason Statham’s fight-by-numbers action thriller just about stays above water The hard-working action hero gives us exactly what we expect, and often want, in this sturdy cargo ship-set caper
Benjamin Lee Wed 19 Aug 2026 18.18 CEST Last modified on Wed 19 Aug 2026 19.49 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google T he 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.
Read more 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 jus…