Make it quick: Mutiny is 95 minutes of Jason Statham, and his best revenge flick in 20 years

If you're after a film where someone gets punched in the face every five minutes and Jason Statham doesn't crack a smile unless he's about to break someone's nose, Mutiny is exactly your cup of tea. It's got Statham doing what he does best: grunting, glaring, and methodically dismantling an improbably large number of baddies. The twist this time? We're stuck out on the high seas, and the bad guys are trafficking humans inside shipping containers. Yes, we're back to classic Statham territory — but with an upgrade in claustrophobia and a healthy slug of uncivilised violence.

Marketed as "Die Hard on a cargo ship", Mutiny is right up there with Crank when it comes to Statham's custom brand of action and style, and it's the ideal movie for a modern action fan seeking a pure iteration of the genre.

Bloody knuckles, steel corridors

Director Jean-François Richet actually bothers to use the setting to full effect. Forget your usual grimy warehouses or generic parking garages — here, you've got Statham as Cole Reed, a one-man wrecking crew, locked in with 20 mercenaries on a vast ship. It's immediately apparent what you're in for: a dose of tension that only gets worse the tighter the corridors get. They've even thrown in Annabelle Wallis, playing Angie Ellis — not the typical window-dressing sidekick, but someone who's equally frantic about getting out (mainly to get back to her daughter, as films of this sort always demand).

Don't expect Mutiny to be transformative cinema; this is straight-up revenge action. Statham goes rogue after a friend is killed, facing overwhelming odds, outnumbered and basically armed with whatever he can find. There's plenty of inventive scrapping, proper gunfights, and the sort of makeshift weaponry that makes you side-eye every bit of metal you see in B&Q from now on. It doesn't win points for plot, but it doesn't have to — it does its job, and does it better than most of the recent copy-paste Statham actioners.

Mutiny is Statham's most effective revenge flick since 2006's Crank, even if critics haven't been queuing up to give it awards.

• Jason Statham as Cole Reed — brooding, battered, and vengeful (par for the course).
• Annabelle Wallis as Angie Ellis — a bit less experienced, but makes up for it in nerve.
• Twenty assorted mercenary antagonists — not named individually for obvious reasons involving their overall life expectancy.

The big selling point: the film thrives on its suffocating shipboard setting. Long stairwells, narrow walkways, explosives going off in rooms about the size of your mum's utility cupboard — it's a great recipe for keeping the tension permanently ratcheted. Compared to a typical city-based shootout, it's positively refreshing to see Statham squeezing every inch out of close quarters, rather than endless concrete jungles.

Chasing the adrenaline crash

Of course, you can't mention Mutiny near a group of British action fans without someone drawing a line back to Crank — Statham's cult classic from 2006 where the threat wasn't so much the villains as his own dangerously slowing heart rate. Where Mutiny weaponises isolation, Crank weaponised panic, speed, and sheer absurdity. Anyone who remembers Chev Chelios — forced to keep his adrenaline at lethal levels as he ran, drove, and fought through Los Angeles hunting down the crooks who injected him with a made-up drug — won't be surprised Mutiny is being measured against it.

Crank might not have topped the critics' lists back in the day, but it's grown into its own oddly beloved status. Directed by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, it was all shaky cameras, breakneck edits, and a plot that genuinely felt perilous. Mutiny, for its part, is the closest Statham has come since to capturing that mix of relentless pace and less-is-more storytelling. It's Statham, adrenaline, and violence — nothing more, nothing less.

Mutiny barrels along with the confidence of a film that knows exactly what it's selling: Statham, fists, blood, and nothing to apologise for.