Film reviews: Mutiny | Coyote vs ACME | Stop! That! Train!
Jason Statham is back on form in Jean-François Richet’s maritime thriller Mutiny, writes Alistair Harkness
Mutiny (15) ★★★★
Coyote vs ACME (PG) ★★★★
Stop! That! Train! (15) ★★★
After a few formulaic duds, Jason Statham gets back to something like his bruising best in Mutiny, a cargo-ship-set thriller in which he takes on the human-trafficking operation responsible for killing his boss. The plot is as perfunctory as ever, but French director Jean-François Richet (who made the similarly enjoyable Gerry Butler action film Plane a few years ago) makes the most of his chrome-domed star by stranding him at sea with Annabel Wallis’s conscience-stricken third mate for company, then forcing them to take down Roland Møller’s tooled-up captain, whose crew stands to make a fortune smuggling cargo containers full of maltreated Thai immigrants.
Fists, knives, padlocks, axes and, at one point a hook (insert your own “right hook” gag here) are among Statham’s character’s weapons of choice and he makes use of them all in thrilling, eye watering ways. It’s good to have him back.
Initially shelved – along with Batgirl – as a tax write-off for original studio Warner Bros, live-action Looney Tunes movie Coyote vs ACME finally arrives in cinemas and proves a delightfully subversive bit of slapstick courtesy of a plot in which Wile E Coyote takes the ACME corporation to court after realising his Sisyphean struggle to catch Roadrunner is largely down to its defective products.
Will Forte is the small town lawyer who reluctantly takes on the case and finds himself going up against his old law school nemesis who's now the head of Acme (he’s played by John Cena). Parodying legal thrillers like Erin Brokovich, and featuring a raft of Looney Tunes favourites (Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck get sly cameos), the resulting film is nostalgic hoot; its anarchic characters and sticking-it-to-the-man plot enhanced by the film’s own art-mirrors-life distribution woes.
Produced by and starring RuPaul (of Drag Race fame), Stop! That! Train! tries to revive Airplane! style spoof comedy with a semi-outrageous tale of a runaway Trans-America train (pun fully intended) on a collision course with a tornado that looks set to kill everyone on board unless drag queen train attendants Tess (Ginger Minj) and DeeDee (Jujubee) can save the day. The aforementioned RuPaul plays President of the United States Judy Gagwell, whose rampant narcissism doesn’t need a roadmap to guide you to its target. The jokes, meanwhile, arrive with rapid-fire speed without necessarily eliciting all that many laughs. It’s all a lot of campy, zany nonsense, dated in places, sharp in others.
All films in cinemas from 21 August
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