Uh-oh! Here comes Jason Statham and he’s in a bad mood again, although anyone familiar with the name will know that already.

Jason, you see, is permanently angry and all het up about something or other, but the problem with having a default-setting scowling countenance is that no one can ever be 100 per cent sure what, specifically, has got his goat.

The expression remains resolutely the same, whether he has the hump over bad guys doing very bad things, or his pizza’s turned up 20 minutes late and half the toppings are wrong.

Nonetheless, it’s a look and persona that continues to serve him well, and while Mutiny may not be blessed with sparkling dialogue or even a scintilla of (intended) humour, our Jason ticks all his usual action hero boxes for a distracting, perfectly serviceable thrill fest.

Statham plays Cole Reed, a former London copper with a chestful of medals for bravery, who has pivoted to the private sector to work as the bodyguard for a moneybags shipping tycoon in Bangkok.

When his boss is gunned down in an ambush, Cole manages to escape the barrage of bullets, only to discover shady elements within the local police force have framed him for the murder.

Once onboard, as if the poor bloke hasn’t got enough on his plate already, he finds desperate, hungry, unwashed women and children being held captive – he’s only gone and stumbled on an evil human trafficking operation!

Plot details are done and dusted in a tidy 20 minutes or so, leaving viewers with an hour-plus of uninterrupted cat-and-mouse games in the ship’s hold, engine room and bridge. This affords Statham untold opportunities to indulge in his bread-and-butter thespian calling of punches, kicks, shoot-’em-ups, and the gruesome piercing of his foes' bodies with an inventive array of sharp objects.

As if to underline the target audience, advance marketing for the film included a mock-up of a well-known poster for Bruce Willis’s first outing as John McClane in 1988’s classic Die Hard.

However, this particular smorgasbord of a lone avenger offing a succession of nasty ne’er-do-wells is closer to Steven Seagal’s seafaring 1992 actioner Under Siege, albeit lacking a chief villain anywhere near as charismatic as Tommy Lee Jones.

Here, Roland Møller’s gloomy head honcho tends to sleepwalk through proceedings while barking out orders and grabbing his radio to assure nearby naval captain Adrian Lester that the distress signal he’s received was just a technical glitch.

Møller also constantly fails to keep Statham’s only ally, plucky non-criminal crew member Annabelle Wallis, under lock and key.

Unlike the oddly underused Lester, Wallis is at least given a bit of a back story and a chance to exercise her own kick-ass chops, but she’s still something of an afterthought character, as the camera relentlessly races after Statham like a needy puppy.

Although the film’s absence of humour is highlighted above, it does elicit a handful of unintentional laughs when Statham, Møller or, less often, Lester are called upon to deliver a line that brings the inherent silliness of proceedings into sharp focus.

It’s perhaps to director Jean-Francois Richet’s credit that his movie never seriously entertains ambitions to be more than it is, and instead goes all out keep the pot simmering by concentrating exclusively on what Statham’s core fan base are looking for.

Mutiny won’t win any awards and it certainly won’t be the best action flick devotees of the genre see this year (they may well see a better one on a streaming platform this ), but at 95 minutes it doesn’t outstay its welcome, and is curiously capable of still raising a smile. Maybe not from Jason, though; that’s never been his thing.

Mutiny is released in UK cinemas on Friday 21 August.

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