Jason
Statham vs. Human Trafficking: A
Working Man and Mutiny
The more time that passes,
the more apparent it is that Jason Statham has become this
generation’s Steven Seagal. At least when he’s in action mode:
unlike Seagal, Statham can switch to British criminal mode and
occasionally into villain mode. But like Seagal, his action movies
dictate that he has to be either a former cop, a former special
forces operative, a former intelligence, or any combination of the
three. He is also borderline unbeatable in his fight scenes, not too
unlike Seagal. But unlike The Rotund One, Statham has kept himself in
tip-top shape over the past quarter of a century since he started
hitting it big. And he has more natural charisma than Seagal ever
could muster, even at his best. But like Seagal, if you watch enough
of his movies, they all start to feel rather interchangeable.
Jason Statham's follow-up to
the sleeper hit that was The Beekeeper—I
wonder how many people watched that because they liked it, and how
much because there simply wasn’t anything better to watch at the
time--was A Working Man, which
reunited with that film’s director, David Ayer. Here we have a film
about human trafficking. Now, let us all remember that Seagal himself
has fought human traffickers on multiple occasions, most notably in
Out of Reach.
But given A Working Man’s
release date, I’m guessing that Statham and company were more
inspired by the runaway success of The
Sound of Freedom than Seagal’s film.
The plot involves the kidnapping of the daughter of Statham's employers, who (yawn!) are like a surrogate family to him. For the record, the family is Mexican, which doesn’t have much bearing on the story, but there you go. Statham is a former British operative whose job took him away from home for long periods of time, which meant he wasn’t around when his wife passed away. His father-in-law has principal custody of his daughter and is fighting for sole custody under the impression that Statham is a violent man who has no business being a dad.
Once the daughter, Jenny (Arianna Rivas), is kidnapped by low-level Russian mobsters, Statham swings into action. (Actually, he goes to see his old war buddy for “permission” first, which buddy is played by David Harbour in a glorified cameo). He starts with the shady bartender at the last establishment—Jenny had been celebrating her first semester of college by getting a fake ID and going bar hopping—the girl had been seen at. This puts him into conflict with some local grunts for the Russia mafia, which leads him to mid-level lieutenant, Wolo Kolysnik (Jason Flemyng). He learns from Wolo that the man’s errant son, Dimi (Maximilian Osinski), was probably the one responsible: Dimi has his hands in all sorts of illegal activity that the other Russian mobsters do not wish to be involved in…such as kidnapping women and whoring them out to the highest bidder.
Because nobody that meets Statham—his name is Levon Cade, but we’ll just call him Statham---lives to tell the tale, it isn’t long before a higher-level mafia boss, Symon Karchenko (Andrej Kaminski), is on Statham’s trail. Apparently Wolo was Yuri’s brother or something. Meanwhile, Statham’s investigation puts him into contact with a gang of biker meth dealers, led by a African-American former special forces operative named Dutch (Chidi Ajufo). Dutch leads him to Dimi, but Statham can’t act until he knows where Dimi is. And it will only be a matter of time before Jenny’s rebellious attitude will get her in trouble with the prospective clients and Dimi’s enforcers, Viper (Emmett Scanlan) and Artemis (Eve Mauro).
On one hand, the film does take its time setting up a rather complex web of relationships between criminals. There are a lot of mini-bosses for Statham to deal with…I didn’t even mention the two unhinged mafia enforcers that Symon’s boss sends to assist him. On the other hand, the film is much too long and spins its wheels in the third act, especially when it introduces the Completely Random Corrupt Cops. Also, much like The Beekeeper, there was far too much profanity in this, especially from Artemis, who swears like she was in a Rob Zombie movie. We’re not talking about Quentin Tarantino “swearing with finesse.” It’s just F-bombs for the sake of F-bombs.
The fight scenes are generally pretty good, staged by Guillermo Grispo. Guillermo’s credits include The Kingsman films and some of the more recent Star Wars projects, like “The Acolyte” and Rogue One. There’s a short fight at the beginning between Statham and some (presumably) Trem de Aragua members hassling a member of the construction team he works for. That has him using a bucket, a pickaxe, and his fists…like a brutal Jackie Chan fight. The martial arts highlight is the fight at the biker bar, which sees him taking on a whole room full of drug-dealing bikers. Good choreography overall. The ending is more of a bullet ballet, but is a disappointment because his final showdown with Dutch is just too easy (which is where the film really feels like a Seagal flick), and his showdown with the two crazy assassins is even more so.
Although less successful than The Beekeeper, A Working Man still did reasonably well for the sort of generic action film that usually gets relegated to direct-to-video status. However, Statham's last two movies--Shelter and Mutiny--have been box office disappointments. I wonder if audiences have figured out that Jason Statham just keeps on making the film over and over again. Or maybe 2026 has really set the stage for successful blockbusters that the last two years didn’t do, so there was simply no way to compete with the likes of The Odyssey and Spider-Man: No Way Home.
Mutiny plays like a rehash of both The Beekeeper and A Working Man. Statham plays a former special forces operative and policeman (seen that before) who is working as a bodyguard for a shipping magnate in Thailand...who serves as a sort of surrogate family for him (seen that before). When bad people cause problems in the of his surrogate family (seen THAT before), he kicks into action to get revenge (seen THAT before) and go on a rescue mission save people from human traffickers (SEEN THAT BEFORE!!!).
The human trafficking element plays like a secondary element to the revenge aspect, although both threads more or less dealt with concurrently. It’s just that the people being trafficked often disappear for large swaths of the movie, at least until the final reel. In that way, Mutiny starts to look a little like The Transporter, but without the car.
The film puts a little more emphasis on the suspense elements than the action. There is a lot of Statham sneaking about the hull and the depths of the ship, trying to avoid conflict where he can. Assisting him is the third-in-command of the ship, a former Navy girl named Angie (Annabelle Wallis, of The Mummy and Anabelle). In this regard, it feels a lot more like the original Die Hard than, say, Under Siege, which was more outright action-oriented.
The action is pretty good, although a little sparse at times. The fights were staged by Godefroy Rykewaert, whose credits include Statham’s own Shelter from this year and the much-maligned The Crow remake. Much of the action is gun-oriented, but we get a narrow corridor knife fight and a big fight involving a fire axe at the end. The knife fight showed up in the red band trailer, in which we see Statham rip a man’s face open with the shackle of a padlock. But then it goes into Martial Club territory, and I’m always down for fights like that (that are well shot and staged). The final fight between Statham and the ship’s captain (Roland Möeller, of Skyscraper and Atomic Blonde) is more brutal Hollywood brawling, including the use of a fire axe (I watched this after several days worth of watching Hitman 3 shorts on Youtube, so I was pleased to see him kill people with an axe).
Mutiny probably has less to say about human trafficking than A Working Man did. The victims play more like an extra wrinkle in Statham’s quest for revenge—and an explanation of why the bad guys are so bad—than actual characters. I mean, we hope they are rescued before the mercenaries sent to pick them up can rape them, but the film is so preoccupied with Statham skulking about the ship that we forget about them whenever they aren’t onscreen. We never really learn who they are, how they were kidnapped, or what exactly the mercenaries’ aims with them are: cheap labor? Slave labor? Sex tourism? All of the above?
After watching The Beekeeper; A Working Man; and Mutiny in rapid succession, I sort of feel like I don’t need to watch anymore Statham films. Or, I don’t expect them to differentiate themselves much more from this template. That said, I do wonder if Statham will find himself relegated to direct-to-video films if the Beekeeper sequel fails to take off with audiences. But who am I kidding, I’ll probably keep on watching his movies regardless.
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