The Mechanic Review: Not Fully Fixed, But Functional

In the movie The Mechanic, Jason Statham steps outside of his comfort zone and into a role he’s never explored before. Just kidding, he’s done this a million times. Ok, so that means he should be really, really good at it right?

Statham plays Arthur Bishop, who is your typical movie hitman, or “mechanic”. Now as they mention in the movie, a mechanic is someone who “fixes things”. He’s known for his very clean and calculated methods of working, essentially making the deaths of his marks look like pure accidental fate. Bishop’s mentor in the business is a man named Harry Mckenna, played by Donald Sutherland. Harry at this point is a trusted friend to Bishop. Soon Bishop is given a new job by his current employer, Dean (Tony Goldwyn), to kill Harry over leaked information that cost the lives of five other hitmen working in South Africa. The news for Bishop is a little hard to swallow but after confronting Harry, Bishop ably completes the assignment. Harry, who still shows semi-respect for Bishop up to that moment, even says he’d rather be killed by him than anyone else. He helps the situation look further accidental by letting Bishop use McKenna’s own personal gun to kill him- but of course not before asking Bishop if he could basically live with himself after this was over. Well, for the time being he could. Bishops takes Harry’s gun too, like some kind of morbid memento.

Bishop soon has the pleasure of meeting up with Harry’s wayward son, Steven (Ben Foster). He’s everything Bishop isn’t: careless, impulsive, hot tempered and violent without reason. Steven is practically on suicide watch at this point with his reckless lifestyle ways. He’s under the impression that his father was killed during a failed carjacking attempt and being the vengeful boy that he is, wants to go on a little man hunt of his own and maybe gun down a few carjackers, just in case he happens to come across the particular one that did Harry in. Sounds like a great idea in theory, I know, but being the indiscreet mess Steven is, Bishop is left with the unfortunate task of becoming a quasi-babysitter to the derelict. However, there seems to be a glimmer of hope on the horizon as Steven becomes more interested in Bishop’s craft and insists on knowing how it is done.  Now it seems we have a new mentor/student situation forming. Bishop begrudgingly begins to condition Steven into a wannabe killing machine, which takes some MAJOR fine tuning on both their parts. Even given a relatively easy assignment to follow, Steven is still harboring so much personal rage that he completely takes the reigns of the operation, turning it into one big messy blood-fest: a sloppy job well done! But Bishop’s a trooper and keeps Steven around regardless, perhaps mainly out of a little guilt for killing the kid’s father.

As the movie goes on, there’s some very short comedic bantering going on in the style that’s come to be expected nowadays. It’s surprisingly not as cliché as one would expect though and it’s just enough to give you a quick laugh without taking away from the drama of the movie. Just another side note I should mention- I’m not even entirely sure if Jason Statham was the actual lead actor in the movie or if it was some kind of android. The man’s expression didn’t change once throughout the movie, and that includes the sex scene. Not to mention, he was pulling a couple Terminator-esque stunts like being able to catch up to fast moving boats by simply swimming over to them. But these are the things you just don’t worry about when you watch an action film I suppose, and it’s a bit irrelevant anyway, so let’s continue.

Down the road it is discovered that one of the five hit men that were gunned down in South Africa is still alive and was paid to kill the other four assassins and fake his own death. The storyline is further complicated when Steven finds his father’s gun stashed away in Bishop’s garage. This is the point where I really needed to see what was going to happen next. You pretty much come to see that Steven is still on the same path of revenge and he winds up paying for it. A few more explosions and bullets later, you have yourself a satisfying ending. It won’t blow you away, it may not even surprise you, but I was pretty happy with it.

This is apparently a remake of the 1972 Charles Bronson film of the same name, which I haven’t seen, but if you have then you may already know the outcome of the story. It definitely follows in the footsteps of every Jason Statham movie ever made but if you’re a fan that’s not such a bad thing at all. It was a good story, but probably won’t become anything too memorable. It isn’t meant to be anything epic, just entertainment, but it kept my interest which isn’t always an easy thing to do! So did Statham deliver as an impressive mechanic? Eh, pretty much.