Review: All aboard ‘Mutiny’ for an ocean of carnage and a puddle of originality

I’ve been wrestling with Jason Statham for a decade and I’m finally conceding defeat. At his best, he’s a superb screen star: a nimble rascal with a twinkle in his eye. Yet he doesn’t respect his own strengths. For every great Statham movie — “Spy,” “Snatch,” “Crank” and its even better sequel — he makes three clunkers that task him merely to scowl and punch. I used to think I was rooting on Statham’s side for better material. “Mutiny” convinced me that he’s content to be a dull brute.

Director Jean-François Richet (“Plane”) helms this brawl-a-thon about a private bodyguard, Cole Reed (Statham), sneaking onto a boat to find out who assassinated his shipping-magnate boss Tibu (Ramon Tikaram). Despite owning a mansion so vast that Cole runs laps around it for exercise and raising a spoiled adult son, Tibu was a mensch who even remembered Cole’s dead father’s birthday even though he never knew the guy. This saintly billionaire is too good to exist — and soon doesn’t.

The cargo boat is embarking on a three-and-a-half week journey from Bangkok to California. (Never fear, it’s routing across the Pacific, not through the Strait of Hormuz.) The captain (Roland Møller) and crew have a fishy amount of guns. Also onboard is a new third mate named Angie (Annabelle Wallis), a last-minute substitute with a bouncy ponytail, and my least favorite plot device, a crate of human trafficking victims.

As per usual, Richet pans across the filthy, fearful faces of these kidnapped women and children, crossing his fingers that the audience will do the emotional work of investing in their well-being while never allowing them to say much more than “Help!” Filmmakers must stop using these human pawns as a crutch until they prove they have more empathy than the bad guys themselves. A word of advice to screenwriters J.P. Davis and Lindsay Michel: Whenever a movie grasps at cheap drama by having a randy captor brag he’s going to “find myself a clean one,” the script comes off just as badly as the creep. I’d rather revert to the days when every lazy thriller relied on a hijacked nuclear bomb.

Cole is a former cop who feels guilty about his father’s death, a backstory as lackluster as the exposition dumps that blurt it out. One scene simply makes a naval officer recite Cole’s dossier on a different boat. The two characters never even meet. Still, this hype man quips, “He’s just what this ship show was missing.” I may have misheard one of those words. Nevertheless, I smiled.

Statham has no intention of delivering more than the minimum of dialogue, let alone emoting. Every movement he makes is efficient, stony and brutal. To his credit, Statham never attempts to act superior to the material — if anything, he overly commits to its cold tone. Meanwhile, Wallis’ Angie is simply a resourceful single mother striving to get home to her 6-year-old daughter. Møller’s heartless captain has even less personality but he does scamper impressively fast up the mast.

The most irritating thing about “Mutiny” is that it has decent ideas that it floats and then casts adrift. An opening sequence in a bank lobby introduces Statham’s Cole as having hyper-sensory awareness of sight and sound. Cinematographer Brendan Galvin and editors David Rosenbloom and Joe Rosenbloom take us inside the bodyguard’s POV as he notes each pen click, pocket grasp and suspicious glance. It’s a neat trick. Shame the film drops it in the first 10 minutes, especially given all the metal footsteps he could echolocate on the ship. We’re also lectured early on that Cole is a chess master, but his alleged intelligence never pays off. He’s not cunning, just athletic.

From headsets that allow secret conversations in the din of the engine room to locked ship passageways that seem to require key cards until they suddenly don’t, the film continually reminds you that it could be worthwhile but can’t be bothered to stay interesting. Even the casting of Tony-nominated Adrian Lester as the Navy commander and Brazilian jujitsu black belt Jason Wong as Cole’s trusty colleague is squandered as their characters spend the running time doing nothing more than passively listening to updates over the phone.

At least fights themselves are fine, choreographing maximum damage in narrow spaces. One combat sequence at the end is genuinely excellent because the film puts actual creative effort into staging a knife-versus-ax duel on a gangplank that sways back and forth over the water. Then it punctuates that gag with a close-up of Cole admiring a pile of weapons — a wrench, a hook, a harpoon — and mutely debating which murder widget to grab next. Likewise, Richet has plenty of his own tools: a $40 million budget, competent craftspeople, a hero capable of charisma and wit. So why doesn’t he use them?

From masterpieces to trash-terpieces, I’m willing to defend most directors against critics who assume they’ve thought more about a movie’s flaws in two hours than the filmmaker did during a year of work. A director doesn’t have control over how their movie is received, but they do know the one they’ve made. Even Oscar winners can point to something they’d fix in every scene. Where I lose patience, though, is when a director assumes the audience doesn’t have a collective brain cell among them and attempts to get away with serving action fans a ration of gruel.

No one is going to see “Mutiny” for the plot, some will counter. Fair point. I’ll go further and say “Mutiny” would be improved if it hadn’t bothered with a script at all and simply titled the film “Thirty Kills in 95 Minutes.” We’re not asking for much here. Just a movie that doesn’t insult us for buying a ticket.

I’ve been wrestling with Jason Statham for a decade and I’m finally conceding defeat. At his best, he’s a superb screen star: a nimble rascal with a twinkle in his eye. Yet he doesn’t respect his own strengths. For every great Statham movie — “Spy,” “Snatch,” “Crank” and its even better sequel — he makes three clunkers that task him merely to scowl and punch. I used to think I was rooting on Statham’s side for better material. “Mutiny” convinced me that he’s content to be a dull brute.

Director Jean-François Richet (“Plane”) helms this brawl-a-thon about a private bodyguard, Cole Reed (Statham), sneaking onto a boat to find out who assassinated his shipping-magnate boss Tibu (Ramon Tikaram). Despite owning a mansion so vast that Cole runs laps around it for exercise and raising a spoiled adult son, Tibu was a mensch who even remembered Cole’s dead father’s birthday even though he never knew the guy. This saintly billionaire is too good to exist — and soon doesn’t.

The cargo boat is embarking on a three-and-a-half week journey from Bangkok to California. (Never fear, it’s routing across the Pacific, not through the Strait of Hormuz.) The captain (Roland Møller) and crew have a fishy amount of guns. Also onboard is a new third mate named Angie (Annabelle Wallis), a last-minute substitute with a bouncy ponytail, and my least favorite plot device, a crate of human trafficking victims.

As per usual, Richet pans across the filthy, fearful faces of these kidnapped women and children, crossing his fingers that the audience will do the emotional work of investing in their well-being while never allowing them to say much more than “Help!” Filmmakers must stop using these human pawns as a crutch until they prove they have more empathy than the bad guys themselves. A word of advice to screenwriters J.P. Davis and Lindsay Michel: Whenever a movie grasps at cheap drama by having a randy captor brag he’s going to “find myself a clean one,” the script comes off just as badly as the creep. I’d rather revert to the days when every lazy thriller relied on a hijacked nuclear bomb.

Cole is a former cop who feels guilty about his father’s death, a backstory as lackluster as the exposition dumps that blurt it out. One scene simply makes a naval officer recite Cole’s dossier on a different boat. The two characters never even meet. Still, this hype man quips, “He’s just what this ship show was missing.” I may have misheard one of those words. Nevertheless, I smiled.

Statham has no intention of delivering more than the minimum of dialogue, let alone emoting. Every movement he makes is efficient, stony and brutal. To his credit, Statham never attempts to act superior to the material — if anything, he overly commits to its cold tone. Meanwhile, Wallis’ Angie is simply a resourceful single mother striving to get home to her 6-year-old daughter. Møller’s heartless captain has even less personality but he does scamper impressively fast up the mast.

The most irritating thing about “Mutiny” is that it has decent ideas that it floats and then casts adrift. An opening sequence in a bank lobby introduces Statham’s Cole as having hyper-sensory awareness of sight and sound. Cinematographer Brendan Galvin and editors David Rosenbloom and Joe Rosenbloom take us inside the bodyguard’s POV as he notes each pen click, pocket grasp and suspicious glance. It’s a neat trick. Shame the film drops it in the first 10 minutes, especially given all the metal footsteps he could echolocate on the ship. We’re also lectured early on that Cole is a chess master, but his alleged intelligence never pays off. He’s not cunning, just athletic.

From headsets that allow secret conversations in the din of the engine room to locked ship passageways that seem to require key cards until they suddenly don’t, the film continually reminds you that it could be worthwhile but can’t be bothered to stay interesting. Even the casting of Tony-nominated Adrian Lester as the Navy commander and Brazilian jujitsu black belt Jason Wong as Cole’s trusty colleague is squandered as their characters spend the running time doing nothing more than passively listening to updates over the phone.

At least fights themselves are fine, choreographing maximum damage in narrow spaces. One combat sequence at the end is genuinely excellent because the film puts actual creative effort into staging a knife-versus-ax duel on a gangplank that sways back and forth over the water. Then it punctuates that gag with a close-up of Cole admiring a pile of weapons — a wrench, a hook, a harpoon — and mutely debating which murder widget to grab next. Likewise, Richet has plenty of his own tools: a $40 million budget, competent craftspeople, a hero capable of charisma and wit. So why doesn’t he use them?

From masterpieces to trash-terpieces, I’m willing to defend most directors against critics who assume they’ve thought more about a movie’s flaws in two hours than the filmmaker did during a year of work. A director doesn’t have control over how their movie is received, but they do know the one they’ve made. Even Oscar winners can point to something they’d fix in every scene. Where I lose patience, though, is when a director assumes the audience doesn’t have a collective brain cell among them and attempts to get away with serving action fans a ration of gruel.

No one is going to see “Mutiny” for the plot, some will counter. Fair point. I’ll go further and say “Mutiny” would be improved if it hadn’t bothered with a script at all and simply titled the film “Thirty Kills in 95 Minutes.” We’re not asking for much here. Just a movie that doesn’t insult us for buying a ticket.

I’ve been wrestling with Jason Statham for a decade and I’m finally conceding defeat. At his best, he’s a superb screen star: a nimble rascal with a twinkle in his eye. Yet he doesn’t respect his own strengths. For every great Statham movie — “Spy,” “Snatch,” “Crank” and its even better sequel — he makes three clunkers that task him merely to scowl and punch. I used to think I was rooting on Statham’s side for better material. “Mutiny” convinced me that he’s content to be a dull brute.

Director Jean-François Richet (“Plane”) helms this brawl-a-thon about a private bodyguard, Cole Reed (Statham), sneaking onto a boat to find out who assassinated his shipping-magnate boss Tibu (Ramon Tikaram). Despite owning a mansion so vast that Cole runs laps around it for exercise and raising a spoiled adult son, Tibu was a mensch who even remembered Cole’s dead father’s birthday even though he never knew the guy. This saintly billionaire is too good to exist — and soon doesn’t.

The cargo boat is embarking on a three-and-a-half week journey from Bangkok to California. (Never fear, it’s routing across the Pacific, not through the Strait of Hormuz.) The captain (Roland Møller) and crew have a fishy amount of guns. Also onboard is a new third mate named Angie (Annabelle Wallis), a last-minute substitute with a bouncy ponytail, and my least favorite plot device, a crate of human trafficking victims.

As per usual, Richet pans across the filthy, fearful faces of these kidnapped women and children, crossing his fingers that the audience will do the emotional work of investing in their well-being while never allowing them to say much more than “Help!” Filmmakers must stop using these human pawns as a crutch until they prove they have more empathy than the bad guys themselves. A word of advice to screenwriters J.P. Davis and Lindsay Michel: Whenever a movie grasps at cheap drama by having a randy captor brag he’s going to “find myself a clean one,” the script comes off just as badly as the creep. I’d rather revert to the days when every lazy thriller relied on a hijacked nuclear bomb.

Cole is a former cop who feels guilty about his father’s death, a backstory as lackluster as the exposition dumps that blurt it out. One scene simply makes a naval officer recite Cole’s dossier on a different boat. The two characters never even meet. Still, this hype man quips, “He’s just what this ship show was missing.” I may have misheard one of those words. Nevertheless, I smiled.

Statham has no intention of delivering more than the minimum of dialogue, let alone emoting. Every movement he makes is efficient, stony and brutal. To his credit, Statham never attempts to act superior to the material — if anything, he overly commits to its cold tone. Meanwhile, Wallis’ Angie is simply a resourceful single mother striving to get home to her 6-year-old daughter. Møller’s heartless captain has even less personality but he does scamper impressively fast up the mast.

The most irritating thing about “Mutiny” is that it has decent ideas that it floats and then casts adrift. An opening sequence in a bank lobby introduces Statham’s Cole as having hyper-sensory awareness of sight and sound. Cinematographer Brendan Galvin and editors David Rosenbloom and Joe Rosenbloom take us inside the bodyguard’s POV as he notes each pen click, pocket grasp and suspicious glance. It’s a neat trick. Shame the film drops it in the first 10 minutes, especially given all the metal footsteps he could echolocate on the ship. We’re also lectured early on that Cole is a chess master, but his alleged intelligence never pays off. He’s not cunning, just athletic.

From headsets that allow secret conversations in the din of the engine room to locked ship passageways that seem to require key cards until they suddenly don’t, the film continually reminds you that it could be worthwhile but can’t be bothered to stay interesting. Even the casting of Tony-nominated Adrian Lester as the Navy commander and Brazilian jujitsu black belt Jason Wong as Cole’s trusty colleague is squandered as their characters spend the running time doing nothing more than passively listening to updates over the phone.

At least fights themselves are fine, choreographing maximum damage in narrow spaces. One combat sequence at the end is genuinely excellent because the film puts actual creative effort into staging a knife-versus-ax duel on a gangplank that sways back and forth over the water. Then it punctuates that gag with a close-up of Cole admiring a pile of weapons — a wrench, a hook, a harpoon — and mutely debating which murder widget to grab next. Likewise, Richet has plenty of his own tools: a $40 million budget, competent craftspeople, a hero capable of charisma and wit. So why doesn’t he use them?

From masterpieces to trash-terpieces, I’m willing to defend most directors against critics who assume they’ve thought more about a movie’s flaws in two hours than the filmmaker did during a year of work. A director doesn’t have control over how their movie is received, but they do know the one they’ve made. Even Oscar winners can point to something they’d fix in every scene. Where I lose patience, though, is when a director assumes the audience doesn’t have a collective brain cell among them and attempts to get away with serving action fans a ration of gruel.

No one is going to see “Mutiny” for the plot, some will counter. Fair point. I’ll go further and say “Mutiny” would be improved if it hadn’t bothered with a script at all and simply titled the film “Thirty Kills in 95 Minutes.” We’re not asking for much here. Just a movie that doesn’t insult us for buying a ticket.

I’ve been wrestling with Jason Statham for a decade and I’m finally conceding defeat. At his best, he’s a superb screen star: a nimble rascal with a twinkle in his eye. Yet he doesn’t respect his own strengths. For every great Statham movie — “Spy,” “Snatch,” “Crank” and its even better sequel — he makes three clunkers that task him merely to scowl and punch. I used to think I was rooting on Statham’s side for better material. “Mutiny” convinced me that he’s content to be a dull brute.

Director Jean-François Richet (“Plane”) helms this brawl-a-thon about a private bodyguard, Cole Reed (Statham), sneaking onto a boat to find out who assassinated his shipping-magnate boss Tibu (Ramon Tikaram). Despite owning a mansion so vast that Cole runs laps around it for exercise and raising a spoiled adult son, Tibu was a mensch who even remembered Cole’s dead father’s birthday even though he never knew the guy. This saintly billionaire is too good to exist — and soon doesn’t.

The cargo boat is embarking on a three-and-a-half week journey from Bangkok to California. (Never fear, it’s routing across the Pacific, not through the Strait of Hormuz.) The captain (Roland Møller) and crew have a fishy amount of guns. Also onboard is a new third mate named Angie (Annabelle Wallis), a last-minute substitute with a bouncy ponytail, and my least favorite plot device, a crate of human trafficking victims.

As per usual, Richet pans across the filthy, fearful faces of these kidnapped women and children, crossing his fingers that the audience will do the emotional work of investing in their well-being while never allowing them to say much more than “Help!” Filmmakers must stop using these human pawns as a crutch until they prove they have more empathy than the bad guys themselves. A word of advice to screenwriters J.P. Davis and Lindsay Michel: Whenever a movie grasps at cheap drama by having a randy captor brag he’s going to “find myself a clean one,” the script comes off just as badly as the creep. I’d rather revert to the days when every lazy thriller relied on a hijacked nuclear bomb.

Cole is a former cop who feels guilty about his father’s death, a backstory as lackluster as the exposition dumps that blurt it out. One scene simply makes a naval officer recite Cole’s dossier on a different boat. The two characters never even meet. Still, this hype man quips, “He’s just what this ship show was missing.” I may have misheard one of those words. Nevertheless, I smiled.

Statham has no intention of delivering more than the minimum of dialogue, let alone emoting. Every movement he makes is efficient, stony and brutal. To his credit, Statham never attempts to act superior to the material — if anything, he overly commits to its cold tone. Meanwhile, Wallis’ Angie is simply a resourceful single mother striving to get home to her 6-year-old daughter. Møller’s heartless captain has even less personality but he does scamper impressively fast up the mast.

The most irritating thing about “Mutiny” is that it has decent ideas that it floats and then casts adrift. An opening sequence in a bank lobby introduces Statham’s Cole as having hyper-sensory awareness of sight and sound. Cinematographer Brendan Galvin and editors David Rosenbloom and Joe Rosenbloom take us inside the bodyguard’s POV as he notes each pen click, pocket grasp and suspicious glance. It’s a neat trick. Shame the film drops it in the first 10 minutes, especially given all the metal footsteps he could echolocate on the ship. We’re also lectured early on that Cole is a chess master, but his alleged intelligence never pays off. He’s not cunning, just athletic.

From headsets that allow secret conversations in the din of the engine room to locked ship passageways that seem to require key cards until they suddenly don’t, the film continually reminds you that it could be worthwhile but can’t be bothered to stay interesting. Even the casting of Tony-nominated Adrian Lester as the Navy commander and Brazilian jujitsu black belt Jason Wong as Cole’s trusty colleague is squandered as their characters spend the running time doing nothing more than passively listening to updates over the phone.

At least fights themselves are fine, choreographing maximum damage in narrow spaces. One combat sequence at the end is genuinely excellent because the film puts actual creative effort into staging a knife-versus-ax duel on a gangplank that sways back and forth over the water. Then it punctuates that gag with a close-up of Cole admiring a pile of weapons — a wrench, a hook, a harpoon — and mutely debating which murder widget to grab next. Likewise, Richet has plenty of his own tools: a $40 million budget, competent craftspeople, a hero capable of charisma and wit. So why doesn’t he use them?

From masterpieces to trash-terpieces, I’m willing to defend most directors against critics who assume they’ve thought more about a movie’s flaws in two hours than the filmmaker did during a year of work. A director doesn’t have control over how their movie is received, but they do know the one they’ve made. Even Oscar winners can point to something they’d fix in every scene. Where I lose patience, though, is when a director assumes the audience doesn’t have a collective brain cell among them and attempts to get away with serving action fans a ration of gruel.

No one is going to see “Mutiny” for the plot, some will counter. Fair point. I’ll go further and say “Mutiny” would be improved if it hadn’t bothered with a script at all and simply titled the film “Thirty Kills in 95 Minutes.” We’re not asking for much here. Just a movie that doesn’t insult us for buying a ticket.

I’ve been wrestling with Jason Statham for a decade and I’m finally conceding defeat. At his best, he’s a superb screen star: a nimble rascal with a twinkle in his eye. Yet he doesn’t respect his own strengths. For every great Statham movie — “Spy,” “Snatch,” “Crank” and its even better sequel — he makes three clunkers that task him merely to scowl and punch. I used to think I was rooting on Statham’s side for better material. “Mutiny” convinced me that he’s content to be a dull brute.

Director Jean-François Richet (“Plane”) helms this brawl-a-thon about a private bodyguard, Cole Reed (Statham), sneaking onto a boat to find out who assassinated his shipping-magnate boss Tibu (Ramon Tikaram). Despite owning a mansion so vast that Cole runs laps around it for exercise and raising a spoiled adult son, Tibu was a mensch who even remembered Cole’s dead father’s birthday even though he never knew the guy. This saintly billionaire is too good to exist — and soon doesn’t.

The cargo boat is embarking on a three-and-a-half week journey from Bangkok to California. (Never fear, it’s routing across the Pacific, not through the Strait of Hormuz.) The captain (Roland Møller) and crew have a fishy amount of guns. Also onboard is a new third mate named Angie (Annabelle Wallis), a last-minute substitute with a bouncy ponytail, and my least favorite plot device, a crate of human trafficking victims.

As per usual, Richet pans across the filthy, fearful faces of these kidnapped women and children, crossing his fingers that the audience will do the emotional work of investing in their well-being while never allowing them to say much more than “Help!” Filmmakers must stop using these human pawns as a crutch until they prove they have more empathy than the bad guys themselves. A word of advice to screenwriters J.P. Davis and Lindsay Michel: Whenever a movie grasps at cheap drama by having a randy captor brag he’s going to “find myself a clean one,” the script comes off just as badly as the creep. I’d rather revert to the days when every lazy thriller relied on a hijacked nuclear bomb.

Cole is a former cop who feels guilty about his father’s death, a backstory as lackluster as the exposition dumps that blurt it out. One scene simply makes a naval officer recite Cole’s dossier on a different boat. The two characters never even meet. Still, this hype man quips, “He’s just what this ship show was missing.” I may have misheard one of those words. Nevertheless, I smiled.

Statham has no intention of delivering more than the minimum of dialogue, let alone emoting. Every movement he makes is efficient, stony and brutal. To his credit, Statham never attempts to act superior to the material — if anything, he overly commits to its cold tone. Meanwhile, Wallis’ Angie is simply a resourceful single mother striving to get home to her 6-year-old daughter. Møller’s heartless captain has even less personality but he does scamper impressively fast up the mast.

The most irritating thing about “Mutiny” is that it has decent ideas that it floats and then casts adrift. An opening sequence in a bank lobby introduces Statham’s Cole as having hyper-sensory awareness of sight and sound. Cinematographer Brendan Galvin and editors David Rosenbloom and Joe Rosenbloom take us inside the bodyguard’s POV as he notes each pen click, pocket grasp and suspicious glance. It’s a neat trick. Shame the film drops it in the first 10 minutes, especially given all the metal footsteps he could echolocate on the ship. We’re also lectured early on that Cole is a chess master, but his alleged intelligence never pays off. He’s not cunning, just athletic.

From headsets that allow secret conversations in the din of the engine room to locked ship passageways that seem to require key cards until they suddenly don’t, the film continually reminds you that it could be worthwhile but can’t be bothered to stay interesting. Even the casting of Tony-nominated Adrian Lester as the Navy commander and Brazilian jujitsu black belt Jason Wong as Cole’s trusty colleague is squandered as their characters spend the running time doing nothing more than passively listening to updates over the phone.

At least fights themselves are fine, choreographing maximum damage in narrow spaces. One combat sequence at the end is genuinely excellent because the film puts actual creative effort into staging a knife-versus-ax duel on a gangplank that sways back and forth over the water. Then it punctuates that gag with a close-up of Cole admiring a pile of weapons — a wrench, a hook, a harpoon — and mutely debating which murder widget to grab next. Likewise, Richet has plenty of his own tools: a $40 million budget, competent craftspeople, a hero capable of charisma and wit. So why doesn’t he use them?

From masterpieces to trash-terpieces, I’m willing to defend most directors against critics who assume they’ve thought more about a movie’s flaws in two hours than the filmmaker did during a year of work. A director doesn’t have control over how their movie is received, but they do know the one they’ve made. Even Oscar winners can point to something they’d fix in every scene. Where I lose patience, though, is when a director assumes the audience doesn’t have a collective brain cell among them and attempts to get away with serving action fans a ration of gruel.

No one is going to see “Mutiny” for the plot, some will counter. Fair point. I’ll go further and say “Mutiny” would be improved if it hadn’t bothered with a script at all and simply titled the film “Thirty Kills in 95 Minutes.” We’re not asking for much here. Just a movie that doesn’t insult us for buying a ticket.

I’ve been wrestling with Jason Statham for a decade and I’m finally conceding defeat. At his best, he’s a superb screen star: a nimble rascal with a twinkle in his eye. Yet he doesn’t respect his own strengths. For every great Statham movie — “Spy,” “Snatch,” “Crank” and its even better sequel — he makes three clunkers that task him merely to scowl and punch. I used to think I was rooting on Statham’s side for better material. “Mutiny” convinced me that he’s content to be a dull brute.

Director Jean-François Richet (“Plane”) helms this brawl-a-thon about a private bodyguard, Cole Reed (Statham), sneaking onto a boat to find out who assassinated his shipping-magnate boss Tibu (Ramon Tikaram). Despite owning a mansion so vast that Cole runs laps around it for exercise and raising a spoiled adult son, Tibu was a mensch who even remembered Cole’s dead father’s birthday even though he never knew the guy. This saintly billionaire is too good to exist — and soon doesn’t.

The cargo boat is embarking on a three-and-a-half week journey from Bangkok to California. (Never fear, it’s routing across the Pacific, not through the Strait of Hormuz.) The captain (Roland Møller) and crew have a fishy amount of guns. Also onboard is a new third mate named Angie (Annabelle Wallis), a last-minute substitute with a bouncy ponytail, and my least favorite plot device, a crate of human trafficking victims.

As per usual, Richet pans across the filthy, fearful faces of these kidnapped women and children, crossing his fingers that the audience will do the emotional work of investing in their well-being while never allowing them to say much more than “Help!” Filmmakers must stop using these human pawns as a crutch until they prove they have more empathy than the bad guys themselves. A word of advice to screenwriters J.P. Davis and Lindsay Michel: Whenever a movie grasps at cheap drama by having a randy captor brag he’s going to “find myself a clean one,” the script comes off just as badly as the creep. I’d rather revert to the days when every lazy thriller relied on a hijacked nuclear bomb.

Cole is a former cop who feels guilty about his father’s death, a backstory as lackluster as the exposition dumps that blurt it out. One scene simply makes a naval officer recite Cole’s dossier on a different boat. The two characters never even meet. Still, this hype man quips, “He’s just what this ship show was missing.” I may have misheard one of those words. Nevertheless, I smiled.

Statham has no intention of delivering more than the minimum of dialogue, let alone emoting. Every movement he makes is efficient, stony and brutal. To his credit, Statham never attempts to act superior to the material — if anything, he overly commits to its cold tone. Meanwhile, Wallis’ Angie is simply a resourceful single mother striving to get home to her 6-year-old daughter. Møller’s heartless captain has even less personality but he does scamper impressively fast up the mast.

The most irritating thing about “Mutiny” is that it has decent ideas that it floats and then casts adrift. An opening sequence in a bank lobby introduces Statham’s Cole as having hyper-sensory awareness of sight and sound. Cinematographer Brendan Galvin and editors David Rosenbloom and Joe Rosenbloom take us inside the bodyguard’s POV as he notes each pen click, pocket grasp and suspicious glance. It’s a neat trick. Shame the film drops it in the first 10 minutes, especially given all the metal footsteps he could echolocate on the ship. We’re also lectured early on that Cole is a chess master, but his alleged intelligence never pays off. He’s not cunning, just athletic.

From headsets that allow secret conversations in the din of the engine room to locked ship passageways that seem to require key cards until they suddenly don’t, the film continually reminds you that it could be worthwhile but can’t be bothered to stay interesting. Even the casting of Tony-nominated Adrian Lester as the Navy commander and Brazilian jujitsu black belt Jason Wong as Cole’s trusty colleague is squandered as their characters spend the running time doing nothing more than passively listening to updates over the phone.

At least fights themselves are fine, choreographing maximum damage in narrow spaces. One combat sequence at the end is genuinely excellent because the film puts actual creative effort into staging a knife-versus-ax duel on a gangplank that sways back and forth over the water. Then it punctuates that gag with a close-up of Cole admiring a pile of weapons — a wrench, a hook, a harpoon — and mutely debating which murder widget to grab next. Likewise, Richet has plenty of his own tools: a $40 million budget, competent craftspeople, a hero capable of charisma and wit. So why doesn’t he use them?

From masterpieces to trash-terpieces, I’m willing to defend most directors against critics who assume they’ve thought more about a movie’s flaws in two hours than the filmmaker did during a year of work. A director doesn’t have control over how their movie is received, but they do know the one they’ve made. Even Oscar winners can point to something they’d fix in every scene. Where I lose patience, though, is when a director assumes the audience doesn’t have a collective brain cell among them and attempts to get away with serving action fans a ration of gruel.

No one is going to see “Mutiny” for the plot, some will counter. Fair point. I’ll go further and say “Mutiny” would be improved if it hadn’t bothered with a script at all and simply titled the film “Thirty Kills in 95 Minutes.” We’re not asking for much here. Just a movie that doesn’t insult us for buying a ticket.

I’ve been wrestling with Jason Statham for a decade and I’m finally conceding defeat. At his best, he’s a superb screen star: a nimble rascal with a twinkle in his eye. Yet he doesn’t respect his own strengths. For every great Statham movie — “Spy,” “Snatch,” “Crank” and its even better sequel — he makes three clunkers that task him merely to scowl and punch. I used to think I was rooting on Statham’s side for better material. “Mutiny” convinced me that he’s content to be a dull brute.

Director Jean-François Richet (“Plane”) helms this brawl-a-thon about a private bodyguard, Cole Reed (Statham), sneaking onto a boat to find out who assassinated his shipping-magnate boss Tibu (Ramon Tikaram). Despite owning a mansion so vast that Cole runs laps around it for exercise and raising a spoiled adult son, Tibu was a mensch who even remembered Cole’s dead father’s birthday even though he never knew the guy. This saintly billionaire is too good to exist — and soon doesn’t.

The cargo boat is embarking on a three-and-a-half week journey from Bangkok to California. (Never fear, it’s routing across the Pacific, not through the Strait of Hormuz.) The captain (Roland Møller) and crew have a fishy amount of guns. Also onboard is a new third mate named Angie (Annabelle Wallis), a last-minute substitute with a bouncy ponytail, and my least favorite plot device, a crate of human trafficking victims.

As per usual, Richet pans across the filthy, fearful faces of these kidnapped women and children, crossing his fingers that the audience will do the emotional work of investing in their well-being while never allowing them to say much more than “Help!” Filmmakers must stop using these human pawns as a crutch until they prove they have more empathy than the bad guys themselves. A word of advice to screenwriters J.P. Davis and Lindsay Michel: Whenever a movie grasps at cheap drama by having a randy captor brag he’s going to “find myself a clean one,” the script comes off just as badly as the creep. I’d rather revert to the days when every lazy thriller relied on a hijacked nuclear bomb.

Cole is a former cop who feels guilty about his father’s death, a backstory as lackluster as the exposition dumps that blurt it out. One scene simply makes a naval officer recite Cole’s dossier on a different boat. The two characters never even meet. Still, this hype man quips, “He’s just what this ship show was missing.” I may have misheard one of those words. Nevertheless, I smiled.

Statham has no intention of delivering more than the minimum of dialogue, let alone emoting. Every movement he makes is efficient, stony and brutal. To his credit, Statham never attempts to act superior to the material — if anything, he overly commits to its cold tone. Meanwhile, Wallis’ Angie is simply a resourceful single mother striving to get home to her 6-year-old daughter. Møller’s heartless captain has even less personality but he does scamper impressively fast up the mast.

The most irritating thing about “Mutiny” is that it has decent ideas that it floats and then casts adrift. An opening sequence in a bank lobby introduces Statham’s Cole as having hyper-sensory awareness of sight and sound. Cinematographer Brendan Galvin and editors David Rosenbloom and Joe Rosenbloom take us inside the bodyguard’s POV as he notes each pen click, pocket grasp and suspicious glance. It’s a neat trick. Shame the film drops it in the first 10 minutes, especially given all the metal footsteps he could echolocate on the ship. We’re also lectured early on that Cole is a chess master, but his alleged intelligence never pays off. He’s not cunning, just athletic.

From headsets that allow secret conversations in the din of the engine room to locked ship passageways that seem to require key cards until they suddenly don’t, the film continually reminds you that it could be worthwhile but can’t be bothered to stay interesting. Even the casting of Tony-nominated Adrian Lester as the Navy commander and Brazilian jujitsu black belt Jason Wong as Cole’s trusty colleague is squandered as their characters spend the running time doing nothing more than passively listening to updates over the phone.

At least fights themselves are fine, choreographing maximum damage in narrow spaces. One combat sequence at the end is genuinely excellent because the film puts actual creative effort into staging a knife-versus-ax duel on a gangplank that sways back and forth over the water. Then it punctuates that gag with a close-up of Cole admiring a pile of weapons — a wrench, a hook, a harpoon — and mutely debating which murder widget to grab next. Likewise, Richet has plenty of his own tools: a $40 million budget, competent craftspeople, a hero capable of charisma and wit. So why doesn’t he use them?

From masterpieces to trash-terpieces, I’m willing to defend most directors against critics who assume they’ve thought more about a movie’s flaws in two hours than the filmmaker did during a year of work. A director doesn’t have control over how their movie is received, but they do know the one they’ve made. Even Oscar winners can point to something they’d fix in every scene. Where I lose patience, though, is when a director assumes the audience doesn’t have a collective brain cell among them and attempts to get away with serving action fans a ration of gruel.

No one is going to see “Mutiny” for the plot, some will counter. Fair point. I’ll go further and say “Mutiny” would be improved if it hadn’t bothered with a script at all and simply titled the film “Thirty Kills in 95 Minutes.” We’re not asking for much here. Just a movie that doesn’t insult us for buying a ticket.

I’ve been wrestling with Jason Statham for a decade and I’m finally conceding defeat. At his best, he’s a superb screen star: a nimble rascal with a twinkle in his eye. Yet he doesn’t respect his own strengths. For every great Statham movie — “Spy,” “Snatch,” “Crank” and its even better sequel — he makes three clunkers that task him merely to scowl and punch. I used to think I was rooting on Statham’s side for better material. “Mutiny” convinced me that he’s content to be a dull brute.

Director Jean-François Richet (“Plane”) helms this brawl-a-thon about a private bodyguard, Cole Reed (Statham), sneaking onto a boat to find out who assassinated his shipping-magnate boss Tibu (Ramon Tikaram). Despite owning a mansion so vast that Cole runs laps around it for exercise and raising a spoiled adult son, Tibu was a mensch who even remembered Cole’s dead father’s birthday even though he never knew the guy. This saintly billionaire is too good to exist — and soon doesn’t.

The cargo boat is embarking on a three-and-a-half week journey from Bangkok to California. (Never fear, it’s routing across the Pacific, not through the Strait of Hormuz.) The captain (Roland Møller) and crew have a fishy amount of guns. Also onboard is a new third mate named Angie (Annabelle Wallis), a last-minute substitute with a bouncy ponytail, and my least favorite plot device, a crate of human trafficking victims.

As per usual, Richet pans across the filthy, fearful faces of these kidnapped women and children, crossing his fingers that the audience will do the emotional work of investing in their well-being while never allowing them to say much more than “Help!” Filmmakers must stop using these human pawns as a crutch until they prove they have more empathy than the bad guys themselves. A word of advice to screenwriters J.P. Davis and Lindsay Michel: Whenever a movie grasps at cheap drama by having a randy captor brag he’s going to “find myself a clean one,” the script comes off just as badly as the creep. I’d rather revert to the days when every lazy thriller relied on a hijacked nuclear bomb.

Cole is a former cop who feels guilty about his father’s death, a backstory as lackluster as the exposition dumps that blurt it out. One scene simply makes a naval officer recite Cole’s dossier on a different boat. The two characters never even meet. Still, this hype man quips, “He’s just what this ship show was missing.” I may have misheard one of those words. Nevertheless, I smiled.

Statham has no intention of delivering more than the minimum of dialogue, let alone emoting. Every movement he makes is efficient, stony and brutal. To his credit, Statham never attempts to act superior to the material — if anything, he overly commits to its cold tone. Meanwhile, Wallis’ Angie is simply a resourceful single mother striving to get home to her 6-year-old daughter. Møller’s heartless captain has even less personality but he does scamper impressively fast up the mast.

The most irritating thing about “Mutiny” is that it has decent ideas that it floats and then casts adrift. An opening sequence in a bank lobby introduces Statham’s Cole as having hyper-sensory awareness of sight and sound. Cinematographer Brendan Galvin and editors David Rosenbloom and Joe Rosenbloom take us inside the bodyguard’s POV as he notes each pen click, pocket grasp and suspicious glance. It’s a neat trick. Shame the film drops it in the first 10 minutes, especially given all the metal footsteps he could echolocate on the ship. We’re also lectured early on that Cole is a chess master, but his alleged intelligence never pays off. He’s not cunning, just athletic.

From headsets that allow secret conversations in the din of the engine room to locked ship passageways that seem to require key cards until they suddenly don’t, the film continually reminds you that it could be worthwhile but can’t be bothered to stay interesting. Even the casting of Tony-nominated Adrian Lester as the Navy commander and Brazilian jujitsu black belt Jason Wong as Cole’s trusty colleague is squandered as their characters spend the running time doing nothing more than passively listening to updates over the phone.

At least fights themselves are fine, choreographing maximum damage in narrow spaces. One combat sequence at the end is genuinely excellent because the film puts actual creative effort into staging a knife-versus-ax duel on a gangplank that sways back and forth over the water. Then it punctuates that gag with a close-up of Cole admiring a pile of weapons — a wrench, a hook, a harpoon — and mutely debating which murder widget to grab next. Likewise, Richet has plenty of his own tools: a $40 million budget, competent craftspeople, a hero capable of charisma and wit. So why doesn’t he use them?

From masterpieces to trash-terpieces, I’m willing to defend most directors against critics who assume they’ve thought more about a movie’s flaws in two hours than the filmmaker did during a year of work. A director doesn’t have control over how their movie is received, but they do know the one they’ve made. Even Oscar winners can point to something they’d fix in every scene. Where I lose patience, though, is when a director assumes the audience doesn’t have a collective brain cell among them and attempts to get away with serving action fans a ration of gruel.

No one is going to see “Mutiny” for the plot, some will counter. Fair point. I’ll go further and say “Mutiny” would be improved if it hadn’t bothered with a script at all and simply titled the film “Thirty Kills in 95 Minutes.” We’re not asking for much here. Just a movie that doesn’t insult us for buying a ticket.

I’ve been wrestling with Jason Statham for a decade and I’m finally conceding defeat. At his best, he’s a superb screen star: a nimble rascal with a twinkle in his eye. Yet he doesn’t respect his own strengths. For every great Statham movie — “Spy,” “Snatch,” “Crank” and its even better sequel — he makes three clunkers that task him merely to scowl and punch. I used to think I was rooting on Statham’s side for better material. “Mutiny” convinced me that he’s content to be a dull brute.

Director Jean-François Richet (“Plane”) helms this brawl-a-thon about a private bodyguard, Cole Reed (Statham), sneaking onto a boat to find out who assassinated his shipping-magnate boss Tibu (Ramon Tikaram). Despite owning a mansion so vast that Cole runs laps around it for exercise and raising a spoiled adult son, Tibu was a mensch who even remembered Cole’s dead father’s birthday even though he never knew the guy. This saintly billionaire is too good to exist — and soon doesn’t.

The cargo boat is embarking on a three-and-a-half week journey from Bangkok to California. (Never fear, it’s routing across the Pacific, not through the Strait of Hormuz.) The captain (Roland Møller) and crew have a fishy amount of guns. Also onboard is a new third mate named Angie (Annabelle Wallis), a last-minute substitute with a bouncy ponytail, and my least favorite plot device, a crate of human trafficking victims.

As per usual, Richet pans across the filthy, fearful faces of these kidnapped women and children, crossing his fingers that the audience will do the emotional work of investing in their well-being while never allowing them to say much more than “Help!” Filmmakers must stop using these human pawns as a crutch until they prove they have more empathy than the bad guys themselves. A word of advice to screenwriters J.P. Davis and Lindsay Michel: Whenever a movie grasps at cheap drama by having a randy captor brag he’s going to “find myself a clean one,” the script comes off just as badly as the creep. I’d rather revert to the days when every lazy thriller relied on a hijacked nuclear bomb.

Cole is a former cop who feels guilty about his father’s death, a backstory as lackluster as the exposition dumps that blurt it out. One scene simply makes a naval officer recite Cole’s dossier on a different boat. The two characters never even meet. Still, this hype man quips, “He’s just what this ship show was missing.” I may have misheard one of those words. Nevertheless, I smiled.

Statham has no intention of delivering more than the minimum of dialogue, let alone emoting. Every movement he makes is efficient, stony and brutal. To his credit, Statham never attempts to act superior to the material — if anything, he overly commits to its cold tone. Meanwhile, Wallis’ Angie is simply a resourceful single mother striving to get home to her 6-year-old daughter. Møller’s heartless captain has even less personality but he does scamper impressively fast up the mast.

The most irritating thing about “Mutiny” is that it has decent ideas that it floats and then casts adrift. An opening sequence in a bank lobby introduces Statham’s Cole as having hyper-sensory awareness of sight and sound. Cinematographer Brendan Galvin and editors David Rosenbloom and Joe Rosenbloom take us inside the bodyguard’s POV as he notes each pen click, pocket grasp and suspicious glance. It’s a neat trick. Shame the film drops it in the first 10 minutes, especially given all the metal footsteps he could echolocate on the ship. We’re also lectured early on that Cole is a chess master, but his alleged intelligence never pays off. He’s not cunning, just athletic.

From headsets that allow secret conversations in the din of the engine room to locked ship passageways that seem to require key cards until they suddenly don’t, the film continually reminds you that it could be worthwhile but can’t be bothered to stay interesting. Even the casting of Tony-nominated Adrian Lester as the Navy commander and Brazilian jujitsu black belt Jason Wong as Cole’s trusty colleague is squandered as their characters spend the running time doing nothing more than passively listening to updates over the phone.

At least fights themselves are fine, choreographing maximum damage in narrow spaces. One combat sequence at the end is genuinely excellent because the film puts actual creative effort into staging a knife-versus-ax duel on a gangplank that sways back and forth over the water. Then it punctuates that gag with a close-up of Cole admiring a pile of weapons — a wrench, a hook, a harpoon — and mutely debating which murder widget to grab next. Likewise, Richet has plenty of his own tools: a $40 million budget, competent craftspeople, a hero capable of charisma and wit. So why doesn’t he use them?

From masterpieces to trash-terpieces, I’m willing to defend most directors against critics who assume they’ve thought more about a movie’s flaws in two hours than the filmmaker did during a year of work. A director doesn’t have control over how their movie is received, but they do know the one they’ve made. Even Oscar winners can point to something they’d fix in every scene. Where I lose patience, though, is when a director assumes the audience doesn’t have a collective brain cell among them and attempts to get away with serving action fans a ration of gruel.

No one is going to see “Mutiny” for the plot, some will counter. Fair point. I’ll go further and say “Mutiny” would be improved if it hadn’t bothered with a script at all and simply titled the film “Thirty Kills in 95 Minutes.” We’re not asking for much here. Just a movie that doesn’t insult us for buying a ticket.

I’ve been wrestling with Jason Statham for a decade and I’m finally conceding defeat. At his best, he’s a superb screen star: a nimble rascal with a twinkle in his eye. Yet he doesn’t respect his own strengths. For every great Statham movie — “Spy,” “Snatch,” “Crank” and its even better sequel — he makes three clunkers that task him merely to scowl and punch. I used to think I was rooting on Statham’s side for better material. “Mutiny” convinced me that he’s content to be a dull brute.

Director Jean-François Richet (“Plane”) helms this brawl-a-thon about a private bodyguard, Cole Reed (Statham), sneaking onto a boat to find out who assassinated his shipping-magnate boss Tibu (Ramon Tikaram). Despite owning a mansion so vast that Cole runs laps around it for exercise and raising a spoiled adult son, Tibu was a mensch who even remembered Cole’s dead father’s birthday even though he never knew the guy. This saintly billionaire is too good to exist — and soon doesn’t.

The cargo boat is embarking on a three-and-a-half week journey from Bangkok to California. (Never fear, it’s routing across the Pacific, not through the Strait of Hormuz.) The captain (Roland Møller) and crew have a fishy amount of guns. Also onboard is a new third mate named Angie (Annabelle Wallis), a last-minute substitute with a bouncy ponytail, and my least favorite plot device, a crate of human trafficking victims.

As per usual, Richet pans across the filthy, fearful faces of these kidnapped women and children, crossing his fingers that the audience will do the emotional work of investing in their well-being while never allowing them to say much more than “Help!” Filmmakers must stop using these human pawns as a crutch until they prove they have more empathy than the bad guys themselves. A word of advice to screenwriters J.P. Davis and Lindsay Michel: Whenever a movie grasps at cheap drama by having a randy captor brag he’s going to “find myself a clean one,” the script comes off just as badly as the creep. I’d rather revert to the days when every lazy thriller relied on a hijacked nuclear bomb.

Cole is a former cop who feels guilty about his father’s death, a backstory as lackluster as the exposition dumps that blurt it out. One scene simply makes a naval officer recite Cole’s dossier on a different boat. The two characters never even meet. Still, this hype man quips, “He’s just what this ship show was missing.” I may have misheard one of those words. Nevertheless, I smiled.

Statham has no intention of delivering more than the minimum of dialogue, let alone emoting. Every movement he makes is efficient, stony and brutal. To his credit, Statham never attempts to act superior to the material — if anything, he overly commits to its cold tone. Meanwhile, Wallis’ Angie is simply a resourceful single mother striving to get home to her 6-year-old daughter. Møller’s heartless captain has even less personality but he does scamper impressively fast up the mast.

The most irritating thing about “Mutiny” is that it has decent ideas that it floats and then casts adrift. An opening sequence in a bank lobby introduces Statham’s Cole as having hyper-sensory awareness of sight and sound. Cinematographer Brendan Galvin and editors David Rosenbloom and Joe Rosenbloom take us inside the bodyguard’s POV as he notes each pen click, pocket grasp and suspicious glance. It’s a neat trick. Shame the film drops it in the first 10 minutes, especially given all the metal footsteps he could echolocate on the ship. We’re also lectured early on that Cole is a chess master, but his alleged intelligence never pays off. He’s not cunning, just athletic.

From headsets that allow secret conversations in the din of the engine room to locked ship passageways that seem to require key cards until they suddenly don’t, the film continually reminds you that it could be worthwhile but can’t be bothered to stay interesting. Even the casting of Tony-nominated Adrian Lester as the Navy commander and Brazilian jujitsu black belt Jason Wong as Cole’s trusty colleague is squandered as their characters spend the running time doing nothing more than passively listening to updates over the phone.

At least fights themselves are fine, choreographing maximum damage in narrow spaces. One combat sequence at the end is genuinely excellent because the film puts actual creative effort into staging a knife-versus-ax duel on a gangplank that sways back and forth over the water. Then it punctuates that gag with a close-up of Cole admiring a pile of weapons — a wrench, a hook, a harpoon — and mutely debating which murder widget to grab next. Likewise, Richet has plenty of his own tools: a $40 million budget, competent craftspeople, a hero capable of charisma and wit. So why doesn’t he use them?

From masterpieces to trash-terpieces, I’m willing to defend most directors against critics who assume they’ve thought more about a movie’s flaws in two hours than the filmmaker did during a year of work. A director doesn’t have control over how their movie is received, but they do know the one they’ve made. Even Oscar winners can point to something they’d fix in every scene. Where I lose patience, though, is when a director assumes the audience doesn’t have a collective brain cell among them and attempts to get away with serving action fans a ration of gruel.

No one is going to see “Mutiny” for the plot, some will counter. Fair point. I’ll go further and say “Mutiny” would be improved if it hadn’t bothered with a script at all and simply titled the film “Thirty Kills in 95 Minutes.” We’re not asking for much here. Just a movie that doesn’t insult us for buying a ticket.

I’ve been wrestling with Jason Statham for a decade and I’m finally conceding defeat. At his best, he’s a superb screen star: a nimble rascal with a twinkle in his eye. Yet he doesn’t respect his own strengths. For every great Statham movie — “Spy,” “Snatch,” “Crank” and its even better sequel — he makes three clunkers that task him merely to scowl and punch. I used to think I was rooting on Statham’s side for better material. “Mutiny” convinced me that he’s content to be a dull brute.

Director Jean-François Richet (“Plane”) helms this brawl-a-thon about a private bodyguard, Cole Reed (Statham), sneaking onto a boat to find out who assassinated his shipping-magnate boss Tibu (Ramon Tikaram). Despite owning a mansion so vast that Cole runs laps around it for exercise and raising a spoiled adult son, Tibu was a mensch who even remembered Cole’s dead father’s birthday even though he never knew the guy. This saintly billionaire is too good to exist — and soon doesn’t.

The cargo boat is embarking on a three-and-a-half week journey from Bangkok to California. (Never fear, it’s routing across the Pacific, not through the Strait of Hormuz.) The captain (Roland Møller) and crew have a fishy amount of guns. Also onboard is a new third mate named Angie (Annabelle Wallis), a last-minute substitute with a bouncy ponytail, and my least favorite plot device, a crate of human trafficking victims.

As per usual, Richet pans across the filthy, fearful faces of these kidnapped women and children, crossing his fingers that the audience will do the emotional work of investing in their well-being while never allowing them to say much more than “Help!” Filmmakers must stop using these human pawns as a crutch until they prove they have more empathy than the bad guys themselves. A word of advice to screenwriters J.P. Davis and Lindsay Michel: Whenever a movie grasps at cheap drama by having a randy captor brag he’s going to “find myself a clean one,” the script comes off just as badly as the creep. I’d rather revert to the days when every lazy thriller relied on a hijacked nuclear bomb.

Cole is a former cop who feels guilty about his father’s death, a backstory as lackluster as the exposition dumps that blurt it out. One scene simply makes a naval officer recite Cole’s dossier on a different boat. The two characters never even meet. Still, this hype man quips, “He’s just what this ship show was missing.” I may have misheard one of those words. Nevertheless, I smiled.

Statham has no intention of delivering more than the minimum of dialogue, let alone emoting. Every movement he makes is efficient, stony and brutal. To his credit, Statham never attempts to act superior to the material — if anything, he overly commits to its cold tone. Meanwhile, Wallis’ Angie is simply a resourceful single mother striving to get home to her 6-year-old daughter. Møller’s heartless captain has even less personality but he does scamper impressively fast up the mast.

The most irritating thing about “Mutiny” is that it has decent ideas that it floats and then casts adrift. An opening sequence in a bank lobby introduces Statham’s Cole as having hyper-sensory awareness of sight and sound. Cinematographer Brendan Galvin and editors David Rosenbloom and Joe Rosenbloom take us inside the bodyguard’s POV as he notes each pen click, pocket grasp and suspicious glance. It’s a neat trick. Shame the film drops it in the first 10 minutes, especially given all the metal footsteps he could echolocate on the ship. We’re also lectured early on that Cole is a chess master, but his alleged intelligence never pays off. He’s not cunning, just athletic.

From headsets that allow secret conversations in the din of the engine room to locked ship passageways that seem to require key cards until they suddenly don’t, the film continually reminds you that it could be worthwhile but can’t be bothered to stay interesting. Even the casting of Tony-nominated Adrian Lester as the Navy commander and Brazilian jujitsu black belt Jason Wong as Cole’s trusty colleague is squandered as their characters spend the running time doing nothing more than passively listening to updates over the phone.

At least fights themselves are fine, choreographing maximum damage in narrow spaces. One combat sequence at the end is genuinely excellent because the film puts actual creative effort into staging a knife-versus-ax duel on a gangplank that sways back and forth over the water. Then it punctuates that gag with a close-up of Cole admiring a pile of weapons — a wrench, a hook, a harpoon — and mutely debating which murder widget to grab next. Likewise, Richet has plenty of his own tools: a $40 million budget, competent craftspeople, a hero capable of charisma and wit. So why doesn’t he use them?

From masterpieces to trash-terpieces, I’m willing to defend most directors against critics who assume they’ve thought more about a movie’s flaws in two hours than the filmmaker did during a year of work. A director doesn’t have control over how their movie is received, but they do know the one they’ve made. Even Oscar winners can point to something they’d fix in every scene. Where I lose patience, though, is when a director assumes the audience doesn’t have a collective brain cell among them and attempts to get away with serving action fans a ration of gruel.

No one is going to see “Mutiny” for the plot, some will counter. Fair point. I’ll go further and say “Mutiny” would be improved if it hadn’t bothered with a script at all and simply titled the film “Thirty Kills in 95 Minutes.” We’re not asking for much here. Just a movie that doesn’t insult us for buying a ticket.

I’ve been wrestling with Jason Statham for a decade and I’m finally conceding defeat. At his best, he’s a superb screen star: a nimble rascal with a twinkle in his eye. Yet he doesn’t respect his own strengths. For every great Statham movie — “Spy,” “Snatch,” “Crank” and its even better sequel — he makes three clunkers that task him merely to scowl and punch. I used to think I was rooting on Statham’s side for better material. “Mutiny” convinced me that he’s content to be a dull brute.

Director Jean-François Richet (“Plane”) helms this brawl-a-thon about a private bodyguard, Cole Reed (Statham), sneaking onto a boat to find out who assassinated his shipping-magnate boss Tibu (Ramon Tikaram). Despite owning a mansion so vast that Cole runs laps around it for exercise and raising a spoiled adult son, Tibu was a mensch who even remembered Cole’s dead father’s birthday even though he never knew the guy. This saintly billionaire is too good to exist — and soon doesn’t.

The cargo boat is embarking on a three-and-a-half week journey from Bangkok to California. (Never fear, it’s routing across the Pacific, not through the Strait of Hormuz.) The captain (Roland Møller) and crew have a fishy amount of guns. Also onboard is a new third mate named Angie (Annabelle Wallis), a last-minute substitute with a bouncy ponytail, and my least favorite plot device, a crate of human trafficking victims.

As per usual, Richet pans across the filthy, fearful faces of these kidnapped women and children, crossing his fingers that the audience will do the emotional work of investing in their well-being while never allowing them to say much more than “Help!” Filmmakers must stop using these human pawns as a crutch until they prove they have more empathy than the bad guys themselves. A word of advice to screenwriters J.P. Davis and Lindsay Michel: Whenever a movie grasps at cheap drama by having a randy captor brag he’s going to “find myself a clean one,” the script comes off just as badly as the creep. I’d rather revert to the days when every lazy thriller relied on a hijacked nuclear bomb.

Cole is a former cop who feels guilty about his father’s death, a backstory as lackluster as the exposition dumps that blurt it out. One scene simply makes a naval officer recite Cole’s dossier on a different boat. The two characters never even meet. Still, this hype man quips, “He’s just what this ship show was missing.” I may have misheard one of those words. Nevertheless, I smiled.

Statham has no intention of delivering more than the minimum of dialogue, let alone emoting. Every movement he makes is efficient, stony and brutal. To his credit, Statham never attempts to act superior to the material — if anything, he overly commits to its cold tone. Meanwhile, Wallis’ Angie is simply a resourceful single mother striving to get home to her 6-year-old daughter. Møller’s heartless captain has even less personality but he does scamper impressively fast up the mast.

The most irritating thing about “Mutiny” is that it has decent ideas that it floats and then casts adrift. An opening sequence in a bank lobby introduces Statham’s Cole as having hyper-sensory awareness of sight and sound. Cinematographer Brendan Galvin and editors David Rosenbloom and Joe Rosenbloom take us inside the bodyguard’s POV as he notes each pen click, pocket grasp and suspicious glance. It’s a neat trick. Shame the film drops it in the first 10 minutes, especially given all the metal footsteps he could echolocate on the ship. We’re also lectured early on that Cole is a chess master, but his alleged intelligence never pays off. He’s not cunning, just athletic.

From headsets that allow secret conversations in the din of the engine room to locked ship passageways that seem to require key cards until they suddenly don’t, the film continually reminds you that it could be worthwhile but can’t be bothered to stay interesting. Even the casting of Tony-nominated Adrian Lester as the Navy commander and Brazilian jujitsu black belt Jason Wong as Cole’s trusty colleague is squandered as their characters spend the running time doing nothing more than passively listening to updates over the phone.

At least fights themselves are fine, choreographing maximum damage in narrow spaces. One combat sequence at the end is genuinely excellent because the film puts actual creative effort into staging a knife-versus-ax duel on a gangplank that sways back and forth over the water. Then it punctuates that gag with a close-up of Cole admiring a pile of weapons — a wrench, a hook, a harpoon — and mutely debating which murder widget to grab next. Likewise, Richet has plenty of his own tools: a $40 million budget, competent craftspeople, a hero capable of charisma and wit. So why doesn’t he use them?

From masterpieces to trash-terpieces, I’m willing to defend most directors against critics who assume they’ve thought more about a movie’s flaws in two hours than the filmmaker did during a year of work. A director doesn’t have control over how their movie is received, but they do know the one they’ve made. Even Oscar winners can point to something they’d fix in every scene. Where I lose patience, though, is when a director assumes the audience doesn’t have a collective brain cell among them and attempts to get away with serving action fans a ration of gruel.

No one is going to see “Mutiny” for the plot, some will counter. Fair point. I’ll go further and say “Mutiny” would be improved if it hadn’t bothered with a script at all and simply titled the film “Thirty Kills in 95 Minutes.” We’re not asking for much here. Just a movie that doesn’t insult us for buying a ticket.

I’ve been wrestling with Jason Statham for a decade and I’m finally conceding defeat. At his best, he’s a superb screen star: a nimble rascal with a twinkle in his eye. Yet he doesn’t respect his own strengths. For every great Statham movie — “Spy,” “Snatch,” “Crank” and its even better sequel — he makes three clunkers that task him merely to scowl and punch. I used to think I was rooting on Statham’s side for better material. “Mutiny” convinced me that he’s content to be a dull brute.

Director Jean-François Richet (“Plane”) helms this brawl-a-thon about a private bodyguard, Cole Reed (Statham), sneaking onto a boat to find out who assassinated his shipping-magnate boss Tibu (Ramon Tikaram). Despite owning a mansion so vast that Cole runs laps around it for exercise and raising a spoiled adult son, Tibu was a mensch who even remembered Cole’s dead father’s birthday even though he never knew the guy. This saintly billionaire is too good to exist — and soon doesn’t.

The cargo boat is embarking on a three-and-a-half week journey from Bangkok to California. (Never fear, it’s routing across the Pacific, not through the Strait of Hormuz.) The captain (Roland Møller) and crew have a fishy amount of guns. Also onboard is a new third mate named Angie (Annabelle Wallis), a last-minute substitute with a bouncy ponytail, and my least favorite plot device, a crate of human trafficking victims.

As per usual, Richet pans across the filthy, fearful faces of these kidnapped women and children, crossing his fingers that the audience will do the emotional work of investing in their well-being while never allowing them to say much more than “Help!” Filmmakers must stop using these human pawns as a crutch until they prove they have more empathy than the bad guys themselves. A word of advice to screenwriters J.P. Davis and Lindsay Michel: Whenever a movie grasps at cheap drama by having a randy captor brag he’s going to “find myself a clean one,” the script comes off just as badly as the creep. I’d rather revert to the days when every lazy thriller relied on a hijacked nuclear bomb.

Cole is a former cop who feels guilty about his father’s death, a backstory as lackluster as the exposition dumps that blurt it out. One scene simply makes a naval officer recite Cole’s dossier on a different boat. The two characters never even meet. Still, this hype man quips, “He’s just what this ship show was missing.” I may have misheard one of those words. Nevertheless, I smiled.

Statham has no intention of delivering more than the minimum of dialogue, let alone emoting. Every movement he makes is efficient, stony and brutal. To his credit, Statham never attempts to act superior to the material — if anything, he overly commits to its cold tone. Meanwhile, Wallis’ Angie is simply a resourceful single mother striving to get home to her 6-year-old daughter. Møller’s heartless captain has even less personality but he does scamper impressively fast up the mast.

The most irritating thing about “Mutiny” is that it has decent ideas that it floats and then casts adrift. An opening sequence in a bank lobby introduces Statham’s Cole as having hyper-sensory awareness of sight and sound. Cinematographer Brendan Galvin and editors David Rosenbloom and Joe Rosenbloom take us inside the bodyguard’s POV as he notes each pen click, pocket grasp and suspicious glance. It’s a neat trick. Shame the film drops it in the first 10 minutes, especially given all the metal footsteps he could echolocate on the ship. We’re also lectured early on that Cole is a chess master, but his alleged intelligence never pays off. He’s not cunning, just athletic.

From headsets that allow secret conversations in the din of the engine room to locked ship passageways that seem to require key cards until they suddenly don’t, the film continually reminds you that it could be worthwhile but can’t be bothered to stay interesting. Even the casting of Tony-nominated Adrian Lester as the Navy commander and Brazilian jujitsu black belt Jason Wong as Cole’s trusty colleague is squandered as their characters spend the running time doing nothing more than passively listening to updates over the phone.

At least fights themselves are fine, choreographing maximum damage in narrow spaces. One combat sequence at the end is genuinely excellent because the film puts actual creative effort into staging a knife-versus-ax duel on a gangplank that sways back and forth over the water. Then it punctuates that gag with a close-up of Cole admiring a pile of weapons — a wrench, a hook, a harpoon — and mutely debating which murder widget to grab next. Likewise, Richet has plenty of his own tools: a $40 million budget, competent craftspeople, a hero capable of charisma and wit. So why doesn’t he use them?

From masterpieces to trash-terpieces, I’m willing to defend most directors against critics who assume they’ve thought more about a movie’s flaws in two hours than the filmmaker did during a year of work. A director doesn’t have control over how their movie is received, but they do know the one they’ve made. Even Oscar winners can point to something they’d fix in every scene. Where I lose patience, though, is when a director assumes the audience doesn’t have a collective brain cell among them and attempts to get away with serving action fans a ration of gruel.

No one is going to see “Mutiny” for the plot, some will counter. Fair point. I’ll go further and say “Mutiny” would be improved if it hadn’t bothered with a script at all and simply titled the film “Thirty Kills in 95 Minutes.” We’re not asking for much here. Just a movie that doesn’t insult us for buying a ticket.

I’ve been wrestling with Jason Statham for a decade and I’m finally conceding defeat. At his best, he’s a superb screen star: a nimble rascal with a twinkle in his eye. Yet he doesn’t respect his own strengths. For every great Statham movie — “Spy,” “Snatch,” “Crank” and its even better sequel — he makes three clunkers that task him merely to scowl and punch. I used to think I was rooting on Statham’s side for better material. “Mutiny” convinced me that he’s content to be a dull brute.

Director Jean-François Richet (“Plane”) helms this brawl-a-thon about a private bodyguard, Cole Reed (Statham), sneaking onto a boat to find out who assassinated his shipping-magnate boss Tibu (Ramon Tikaram). Despite owning a mansion so vast that Cole runs laps around it for exercise and raising a spoiled adult son, Tibu was a mensch who even remembered Cole’s dead father’s birthday even though he never knew the guy. This saintly billionaire is too good to exist — and soon doesn’t.

The cargo boat is embarking on a three-and-a-half week journey from Bangkok to California. (Never fear, it’s routing across the Pacific, not through the Strait of Hormuz.) The captain (Roland Møller) and crew have a fishy amount of guns. Also onboard is a new third mate named Angie (Annabelle Wallis), a last-minute substitute with a bouncy ponytail, and my least favorite plot device, a crate of human trafficking victims.

As per usual, Richet pans across the filthy, fearful faces of these kidnapped women and children, crossing his fingers that the audience will do the emotional work of investing in their well-being while never allowing them to say much more than “Help!” Filmmakers must stop using these human pawns as a crutch until they prove they have more empathy than the bad guys themselves. A word of advice to screenwriters J.P. Davis and Lindsay Michel: Whenever a movie grasps at cheap drama by having a randy captor brag he’s going to “find myself a clean one,” the script comes off just as badly as the creep. I’d rather revert to the days when every lazy thriller relied on a hijacked nuclear bomb.

Cole is a former cop who feels guilty about his father’s death, a backstory as lackluster as the exposition dumps that blurt it out. One scene simply makes a naval officer recite Cole’s dossier on a different boat. The two characters never even meet. Still, this hype man quips, “He’s just what this ship show was missing.” I may have misheard one of those words. Nevertheless, I smiled.

Statham has no intention of delivering more than the minimum of dialogue, let alone emoting. Every movement he makes is efficient, stony and brutal. To his credit, Statham never attempts to act superior to the material — if anything, he overly commits to its cold tone. Meanwhile, Wallis’ Angie is simply a resourceful single mother striving to get home to her 6-year-old daughter. Møller’s heartless captain has even less personality but he does scamper impressively fast up the mast.

The most irritating thing about “Mutiny” is that it has decent ideas that it floats and then casts adrift. An opening sequence in a bank lobby introduces Statham’s Cole as having hyper-sensory awareness of sight and sound. Cinematographer Brendan Galvin and editors David Rosenbloom and Joe Rosenbloom take us inside the bodyguard’s POV as he notes each pen click, pocket grasp and suspicious glance. It’s a neat trick. Shame the film drops it in the first 10 minutes, especially given all the metal footsteps he could echolocate on the ship. We’re also lectured early on that Cole is a chess master, but his alleged intelligence never pays off. He’s not cunning, just athletic.

From headsets that allow secret conversations in the din of the engine room to locked ship passageways that seem to require key cards until they suddenly don’t, the film continually reminds you that it could be worthwhile but can’t be bothered to stay interesting. Even the casting of Tony-nominated Adrian Lester as the Navy commander and Brazilian jujitsu black belt Jason Wong as Cole’s trusty colleague is squandered as their characters spend the running time doing nothing more than passively listening to updates over the phone.

At least fights themselves are fine, choreographing maximum damage in narrow spaces. One combat sequence at the end is genuinely excellent because the film puts actual creative effort into staging a knife-versus-ax duel on a gangplank that sways back and forth over the water. Then it punctuates that gag with a close-up of Cole admiring a pile of weapons — a wrench, a hook, a harpoon — and mutely debating which murder widget to grab next. Likewise, Richet has plenty of his own tools: a $40 million budget, competent craftspeople, a hero capable of charisma and wit. So why doesn’t he use them?

From masterpieces to trash-terpieces, I’m willing to defend most directors against critics who assume they’ve thought more about a movie’s flaws in two hours than the filmmaker did during a year of work. A director doesn’t have control over how their movie is received, but they do know the one they’ve made. Even Oscar winners can point to something they’d fix in every scene. Where I lose patience, though, is when a director assumes the audience doesn’t have a collective brain cell among them and attempts to get away with serving action fans a ration of gruel.

No one is going to see “Mutiny” for the plot, some will counter. Fair point. I’ll go further and say “Mutiny” would be improved if it hadn’t bothered with a script at all and simply titled the film “Thirty Kills in 95 Minutes.” We’re not asking for much here. Just a movie that doesn’t insult us for buying a ticket.

I’ve been wrestling with Jason Statham for a decade and I’m finally conceding defeat. At his best, he’s a superb screen star: a nimble rascal with a twinkle in his eye. Yet he doesn’t respect his own strengths. For every great Statham movie — “Spy,” “Snatch,” “Crank” and its even better sequel — he makes three clunkers that task him merely to scowl and punch. I used to think I was rooting on Statham’s side for better material. “Mutiny” convinced me that he’s content to be a dull brute.

Director Jean-François Richet (“Plane”) helms this brawl-a-thon about a private bodyguard, Cole Reed (Statham), sneaking onto a boat to find out who assassinated his shipping-magnate boss Tibu (Ramon Tikaram). Despite owning a mansion so vast that Cole runs laps around it for exercise and raising a spoiled adult son, Tibu was a mensch who even remembered Cole’s dead father’s birthday even though he never knew the guy. This saintly billionaire is too good to exist — and soon doesn’t.

The cargo boat is embarking on a three-and-a-half week journey from Bangkok to California. (Never fear, it’s routing across the Pacific, not through the Strait of Hormuz.) The captain (Roland Møller) and crew have a fishy amount of guns. Also onboard is a new third mate named Angie (Annabelle Wallis), a last-minute substitute with a bouncy ponytail, and my least favorite plot device, a crate of human trafficking victims.

As per usual, Richet pans across the filthy, fearful faces of these kidnapped women and children, crossing his fingers that the audience will do the emotional work of investing in their well-being while never allowing them to say much more than “Help!” Filmmakers must stop using these human pawns as a crutch until they prove they have more empathy than the bad guys themselves. A word of advice to screenwriters J.P. Davis and Lindsay Michel: Whenever a movie grasps at cheap drama by having a randy captor brag he’s going to “find myself a clean one,” the script comes off just as badly as the creep. I’d rather revert to the days when every lazy thriller relied on a hijacked nuclear bomb.

Cole is a former cop who feels guilty about his father’s death, a backstory as lackluster as the exposition dumps that blurt it out. One scene simply makes a naval officer recite Cole’s dossier on a different boat. The two characters never even meet. Still, this hype man quips, “He’s just what this ship show was missing.” I may have misheard one of those words. Nevertheless, I smiled.

Statham has no intention of delivering more than the minimum of dialogue, let alone emoting. Every movement he makes is efficient, stony and brutal. To his credit, Statham never attempts to act superior to the material — if anything, he overly commits to its cold tone. Meanwhile, Wallis’ Angie is simply a resourceful single mother striving to get home to her 6-year-old daughter. Møller’s heartless captain has even less personality but he does scamper impressively fast up the mast.

The most irritating thing about “Mutiny” is that it has decent ideas that it floats and then casts adrift. An opening sequence in a bank lobby introduces Statham’s Cole as having hyper-sensory awareness of sight and sound. Cinematographer Brendan Galvin and editors David Rosenbloom and Joe Rosenbloom take us inside the bodyguard’s POV as he notes each pen click, pocket grasp and suspicious glance. It’s a neat trick. Shame the film drops it in the first 10 minutes, especially given all the metal footsteps he could echolocate on the ship. We’re also lectured early on that Cole is a chess master, but his alleged intelligence never pays off. He’s not cunning, just athletic.

From headsets that allow secret conversations in the din of the engine room to locked ship passageways that seem to require key cards until they suddenly don’t, the film continually reminds you that it could be worthwhile but can’t be bothered to stay interesting. Even the casting of Tony-nominated Adrian Lester as the Navy commander and Brazilian jujitsu black belt Jason Wong as Cole’s trusty colleague is squandered as their characters spend the running time doing nothing more than passively listening to updates over the phone.

At least fights themselves are fine, choreographing maximum damage in narrow spaces. One combat sequence at the end is genuinely excellent because the film puts actual creative effort into staging a knife-versus-ax duel on a gangplank that sways back and forth over the water. Then it punctuates that gag with a close-up of Cole admiring a pile of weapons — a wrench, a hook, a harpoon — and mutely debating which murder widget to grab next. Likewise, Richet has plenty of his own tools: a $40 million budget, competent craftspeople, a hero capable of charisma and wit. So why doesn’t he use them?

From masterpieces to trash-terpieces, I’m willing to defend most directors against critics who assume they’ve thought more about a movie’s flaws in two hours than the filmmaker did during a year of work. A director doesn’t have control over how their movie is received, but they do know the one they’ve made. Even Oscar winners can point to something they’d fix in every scene. Where I lose patience, though, is when a director assumes the audience doesn’t have a collective brain cell among them and attempts to get away with serving action fans a ration of gruel.

No one is going to see “Mutiny” for the plot, some will counter. Fair point. I’ll go further and say “Mutiny” would be improved if it hadn’t bothered with a script at all and simply titled the film “Thirty Kills in 95 Minutes.” We’re not asking for much here. Just a movie that doesn’t insult us for buying a ticket.

I’ve been wrestling with Jason Statham for a decade and I’m finally conceding defeat. At his best, he’s a superb screen star: a nimble rascal with a twinkle in his eye. Yet he doesn’t respect his own strengths. For every great Statham movie — “Spy,” “Snatch,” “Crank” and its even better sequel — he makes three clunkers that task him merely to scowl and punch. I used to think I was rooting on Statham’s side for better material. “Mutiny” convinced me that he’s content to be a dull brute.

Director Jean-François Richet (“Plane”) helms this brawl-a-thon about a private bodyguard, Cole Reed (Statham), sneaking onto a boat to find out who assassinated his shipping-magnate boss Tibu (Ramon Tikaram). Despite owning a mansion so vast that Cole runs laps around it for exercise and raising a spoiled adult son, Tibu was a mensch who even remembered Cole’s dead father’s birthday even though he never knew the guy. This saintly billionaire is too good to exist — and soon doesn’t.

The cargo boat is embarking on a three-and-a-half week journey from Bangkok to California. (Never fear, it’s routing across the Pacific, not through the Strait of Hormuz.) The captain (Roland Møller) and crew have a fishy amount of guns. Also onboard is a new third mate named Angie (Annabelle Wallis), a last-minute substitute with a bouncy ponytail, and my least favorite plot device, a crate of human trafficking victims.

As per usual, Richet pans across the filthy, fearful faces of these kidnapped women and children, crossing his fingers that the audience will do the emotional work of investing in their well-being while never allowing them to say much more than “Help!” Filmmakers must stop using these human pawns as a crutch until they prove they have more empathy than the bad guys themselves. A word of advice to screenwriters J.P. Davis and Lindsay Michel: Whenever a movie grasps at cheap drama by having a randy captor brag he’s going to “find myself a clean one,” the script comes off just as badly as the creep. I’d rather revert to the days when every lazy thriller relied on a hijacked nuclear bomb.

Cole is a former cop who feels guilty about his father’s death, a backstory as lackluster as the exposition dumps that blurt it out. One scene simply makes a naval officer recite Cole’s dossier on a different boat. The two characters never even meet. Still, this hype man quips, “He’s just what this ship show was missing.” I may have misheard one of those words. Nevertheless, I smiled.

Statham has no intention of delivering more than the minimum of dialogue, let alone emoting. Every movement he makes is efficient, stony and brutal. To his credit, Statham never attempts to act superior to the material — if anything, he overly commits to its cold tone. Meanwhile, Wallis’ Angie is simply a resourceful single mother striving to get home to her 6-year-old daughter. Møller’s heartless captain has even less personality but he does scamper impressively fast up the mast.

The most irritating thing about “Mutiny” is that it has decent ideas that it floats and then casts adrift. An opening sequence in a bank lobby introduces Statham’s Cole as having hyper-sensory awareness of sight and sound. Cinematographer Brendan Galvin and editors David Rosenbloom and Joe Rosenbloom take us inside the bodyguard’s POV as he notes each pen click, pocket grasp and suspicious glance. It’s a neat trick. Shame the film drops it in the first 10 minutes, especially given all the metal footsteps he could echolocate on the ship. We’re also lectured early on that Cole is a chess master, but his alleged intelligence never pays off. He’s not cunning, just athletic.

From headsets that allow secret conversations in the din of the engine room to locked ship passageways that seem to require key cards until they suddenly don’t, the film continually reminds you that it could be worthwhile but can’t be bothered to stay interesting. Even the casting of Tony-nominated Adrian Lester as the Navy commander and Brazilian jujitsu black belt Jason Wong as Cole’s trusty colleague is squandered as their characters spend the running time doing nothing more than passively listening to updates over the phone.

At least fights themselves are fine, choreographing maximum damage in narrow spaces. One combat sequence at the end is genuinely excellent because the film puts actual creative effort into staging a knife-versus-ax duel on a gangplank that sways back and forth over the water. Then it punctuates that gag with a close-up of Cole admiring a pile of weapons — a wrench, a hook, a harpoon — and mutely debating which murder widget to grab next. Likewise, Richet has plenty of his own tools: a $40 million budget, competent craftspeople, a hero capable of charisma and wit. So why doesn’t he use them?

From masterpieces to trash-terpieces, I’m willing to defend most directors against critics who assume they’ve thought more about a movie’s flaws in two hours than the filmmaker did during a year of work. A director doesn’t have control over how their movie is received, but they do know the one they’ve made. Even Oscar winners can point to something they’d fix in every scene. Where I lose patience, though, is when a director assumes the audience doesn’t have a collective brain cell among them and attempts to get away with serving action fans a ration of gruel.

No one is going to see “Mutiny” for the plot, some will counter. Fair point. I’ll go further and say “Mutiny” would be improved if it hadn’t bothered with a script at all and simply titled the film “Thirty Kills in 95 Minutes.” We’re not asking for much here. Just a movie that doesn’t insult us for buying a ticket.