The Mechanic

Lets get this out of the way, The Mechanic is: Meh.

The Mechanic follows the character of Jason Statham, I mean it follows Arthur Bishop, played by Jason Statham. Yes, Statham is doing the standard Statham role, which is fine. Bishop is an assassin for hire who is, as we see in the opening scenes, meticulous in his planning. Bishop is given an assignment that he completes and ends up taking on a pupil afterwards. That’s as much as I can write about the plot without spoiling it.

The director, Simon West (Con Air and Tomb Raider), has mistaken glorified violence as action. There is a lot of violence in this film that does not create any sort of excitement or tension that is usually associated with an action film. The film feels flat and boring most of the time.

Overall, I cannot recommend The Mechanic, it was hard to slog through this mess. Even Jason Statham, who can usually elevate mediocre action films can’t save The Mechanic.

Spoilers

There were two twists in the movie that were not surprising.

The first was related to the story around Dean hiring Bishop to kill Harry McKenna (Donald Sutherland). This storyline pushes Bishop to take McKenna’s son Steve under his wing as a pupil. When the meeting between Dean and Bishop happened, it was pretty clear that Dean was playing Bishop, so when it was reveal near the end that this was the case… Well, not very surprised.

Bishop takes McKenna’s son Steve (Ben Foster) under his wing to teach him how to be an assassin. Steve is a drug abuser, drunk and plain loser. Bishop as we know is a meticulous planner. Did Bishop take this loser under his wing because he was feeling guilty? That’s what the script wants you to think, but really, a character like Bishop would not make this kind of mistake. So, it was obvious that Bishop was playing a long con on Steve. I knew that by the end, Steve would finally “discover” that Bishop killed his dad and would try to kill Bishop in revenge. And of course, Bishop would end up killing Steve.

What did not make sense was why Bishop went through this long con in the first place since it was a complete was of time. If Bishop wanted to kill Steve, he could have done it up front. The only reason I could come up with is that the writers were lazy and they wanted tobe clever with the twist. I was not impressed.