Action
Mutiny (15)
Review: Jason Statham is all at sea in his latest action-packed caper, which pits the former diver and model turned big screen hard man against a ruthless people-trafficking ring that uses shipping containers to transport unsuspecting refugees to their miserable fates. French director Jean-Francois Richet trades the airborne thrills of his previous film, Plane starring Gerard Butler, for hand-to-hand combat on a moving cargo vessel replete with a large fishhook and harpoon gun as conveniently placed weapons.
Statham plays highly decorated former Special Forces operative and Metropolitan Police officer Cole Reed, who leads the bodyguard detail of billionaire Tibu Campallo (Ramon Tikaram). Cole saved Tibu’s life five years ago and is considered part of the family. The taciturn protector oversees security in Bangkok where Tibu completes the sale of his shipping company, KMG, to provide his son Kameron (Chaneil Kular) with funds to pursue his dreams. Shortly after celebratory glasses have been clinked, arm-toting assassins kill Tibu and Cole is framed for the murder, masterminded by business rival Daniles (Simon Kluth). Bangkok police give chase and Cole impersonates a KMG employee to board the cargo ship Artemis captained by Marko Madsen (Roland Moller).
Deep in the ship’s hold, Cole discovers malnourished and dehydrated migrants locked inside a shipping crate and he vows to help them escape. Cole is now the right man in the wrong place to wage a one-man crusade against Marko, first mate Mateo (Arnas Fedaravicius) and the rest of the crew, who are willing accomplices to the trafficking. Luckily for Cole, third mate Angie Ellis (Annabelle Wallis) is a last-minute addition to the crew and she is equally appalled by the captain’s heartless actions. Angie aligns with Cole to protect the innocent and issue a mayday call to a nearby US Navy captain (Adrian Lester) and his aircraft carrier.
Mutiny is a derivative Die Hard clone that utilises every nook and cranny of the cargo ship to play a high-stakes game of cat and mouse between Marko’s villainous crew and Cole and Angie. Fight choreographers Laurent Buson and Godefroy Ryckewaert, who worked with Statham on his last film Shelter, put the actor through his paces in frenetically paced skirmishes including one-on-one showdown in the tight space between two shipping crates.
Statham has sustained a fruitful career from growling risible dialogue and screenwriters Lindsay Michel and JP Davis throw plausibility overboard to arm the actor with unintentionally hilarious one-liners. Co-stars Wallis and Lester are complicit in the ludicrousness, delivering clunky exposition with impressively straight faces. An early scene with a TV reporter, whose leaden and monotone delivery of an evolving story defies belief, establishes the haphazard tone. Breaking news: the tide is high but expectations are low.
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Comedy
Spa Weekend (15)
Review: Girls just wanna have fun and they intend to have plenty in this raucous comedy of female friendships and empowerment written and directed by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore. Coco (Michelle Buteau), Jane (Leslie Mann) and Sophie (Anna Faris) realise that they have allowed life to get in the way of their childhood friendship and they need to dedicate quality time to each other. The trio arranges a luxury girls’ getaway with some much-needed pampering.
A weekend dedicated to relaxation and bonding rapidly descends into delirium when trainwreck friend Mel (Isla Fisher) gate-crashes the retreat and leaves destruction in her wake. Reviews of Spa Weekend are embargoed until Friday morning. Please check back later in the week for our full review.
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Comedy
Stop! That! Train! (15)
Review: Drag pioneer RuPaul Charles sashays away from judging his Emmy Award-winning competition series to get America back on track in a zany comedy that can be succinctly summed up as Airplane! on a train. Screenwriters Christina Friel and Connor Wright fail to cause a locomotion with a disaster movie scenario laden with puns, malapropisms and Drag Race sight gags including a recreation of Sasha Velour’s rose petal wig reveal.
Stank Rail co-workers and best friends Tess (Ginger Minj) and DeeDee (Jujubee) lose their jobs shortly before the beginning of a shift and the enterprising duo blag their way on board luxury rival, the Glamazonian Express, posing as new hires. First class stewardesses Amber (Brooke Lynn Hytes), Alli (Marty Lauter) and Ayshleiygh (Symone) go out of their way to bully and belittle the rookies, who are happily consigned to the economy carriage.
An escaped pet scorpion stings conductor Davenport (Chris Parnell), leaving Tess, DeeDee and inexperienced co-conductor Cal (Brian Jordan Alvarez) in charge of a runaway train heading into a once-in-a-lifetime meteorological event – a stormaganza. As the locomotive speeds down the tracks, United States Train Command Center employee Donna Dusk (Rachel Bloom) overcomes the flagrant chauvinism of colleagues to brainstorm solutions to the impending catastrophe. Meanwhile, in the corridors of power in Washington DC, incumbent US president Judy Gagwell (RuPaul Charles) calls on her military training with the now-defunct United Train Force to manage the Glamazonian Express crisis and boost her plummeting approval ratings with the help of her obsequious press secretary (Matt Rogers).
The punctuation is on point in Stop! That! Train!. It’s a pity the script serving the tomfoolery isn’t sharper because some of the funniest Drag Race alumni including Latrice Royale, Monet X Change and Angeria Paris VanMicheals are repeatedly short-changed. Even with their impeccable timing and innate charm, they can’t spin straw into comedy gold. Out-takes embedded in the end credits prove the cast were having a blast making the film but their laughter, regrettably, doesn’t transmit through the screen.
Director Adam Shankman, who masterminded the effervescent 2007 musical film version of Hairspray, delivers a pair of energetic lip-sync sequences with original songs composed by Leland. These interludes play to the strengths of a core cast of drag divas and are reminiscent of the musical challenges on the TV show. Again, neither is particularly funny but any acceleration of tempo is a welcome distraction from the metronomic thuds of jokes falling flat. Ginger Minj and Jujubee are two of the strongest dramatic performers from the Drag Race franchise and they are a sweetly appealing double act in faux jeopardy. Their charisma, uniqueness, nerve and talent is far greater than Shankman’s lumbering and lacklustre picture deserves.
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Horror
Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma (15)
Review: It’s no coincidence that the name of the spear-wielding antagonist in Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma, a helmet-clad menace called Little Death, translates in French as la petite mort, and euphemistically refers to the sensorial overload of an orgasm. Horniness and horror are flirtatious bedfellows in nonbinary writer-director Jane Schoenbrun’s slasher, and their script delights in the tangled relationship between carnality and cinema.
Filmmaker Kris (Hannah Einbinder) is thrilled to be chosen to direct a reboot of the popular Camp Miasma horrors featuring Little Death (Jack Haven). Kris is acutely aware that her appointment is politically motivated to quieten accusations of transphobia that dogged the original pictures, but she has been a huge fan of the series since seeing the first film at an impressionable age. Leaving behind her partner Mari (Jasmin Savoy Brown) and polyamorous third wheel Thor (Aren Buchholz), Kris dives into pre-production by travelling to the abandoned summer camp where the original instalments were shot. The site is now home to Norma Desmond-like recluse Billy (Gillian Anderson), who acted in the first film.
Kris arrives during a snowstorm and Billy kindly offers homespun hospitality and anecdotes from the set. The two women watch the original film together and an emotional bond develops between the pair as they dive headfirst into a blood-soaked mythology which playfully honours Friday The 13th and its affectionate imitators. As lines between fantasy and reality become dangerously blurred and Kris becomes convinced that she wants Billy to star in her film, Little Death rises again to claim more victims.
Shot in just 25 days, Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma explores a hypersexualised and problematic subgenre of cinema through an LGBTQ lens with style, stoking smouldering embers of erotic tension between the two leads until desire overflows with spurts of viscous blood. Hacks star Einbinder and Anderson burrow beneath the translucent skins of their protagonists, the latter burning bright as a fading, southern-drawled belle who is used to wearing masks on and off screen. Seldom has the act of eating a bucket of fried chicken with plentiful dipping sauce been rendered with such finger-lickin’ sensuality.
Schoenbrun conjures a familiar backstory for their seemingly immortal killer, who moves painfully slowly in a costume akin to a deep-sea diving suit. Cruel campers drowned androgynous Little Death as a child and the vengeful villain sporadically rises from the lake, clutching a metal spear, ready to slaughter everyone in the vicinity. The filmmaker builds on themes of gender identity and authentic self-expression from their previous work, which includes I Saw The TV Glow. The act of penetration inflicts pleasure and pain through Schoenbrun’s eyes, sometimes simultaneously, as characters’ moans reach a fittingly sticky climax.
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