Movie review: The Mechanic

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

Genre: Action/Adventure

Opens locally Friday, January 28th, 2011, Rated R

Run Time: 1 hour, 32 minutes

Starring: Jason Statham, Ben Foster, Donald Sutherland

Directed by Simon West (Con Air, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider)

​A mechanic is usually hired to fix problems…had someone like this would have been hired to work on “The Mechanic”, they would have labeled it a lemon, in immediate need of being junk-piled. “The Mechanic” is the latest film starring popular-action-star flavor-of-the-month, Jason Statham. A “mechanic” as mentioned, is someone usually hired to fix problems with your car, or other machinery. It also is the word used to describe hit men like Statham’s character, Arthur Bishop….hired by seedy business-people to “fix problems”, so to speak, by killing them in various ways

In fact, the movie teaches us that anybody can pull a trigger…it takes specific talent to kill someone the right way. Some people you want to send a message to, or you may want to frame someone else for the killing. Other times you need to make it look like an accident, and in the opening scene we see just how this is accomplished, and how skilled a “mechanic” Arthur Bishop is. Why then, does he spend the remainder of the movie recklessly shooting and bashing other people’s brains in? Did he not tell us that “anyone can kill” but that his job required skill? We also see him mercilessly kill, yet he grows a conscience after we see his shocking brutality. Inaccuracies like this severely hinder this film as being anything more than just your average action adventure.

A couple unexpected twists in the beginning of the film set up an interesting premise, but then the film just turns into a mindless adrenaline rush, with a few jokes and bits of dialogue thrown in to remind us that we aren’t just watching an extended trailer. I’m a Ben Foster fan, but he’s wasted here as is Donald Sutherland, who’s character is in a wheelchair for no purpose whatsoever, other than to produce sympathy towards his character.

​If you love Statham, you won’t really care what I write…but fans of his should be warned that “The Mechanic” isn’t recommendable even by his standards. It’s the kind of film that has you cheering for the worst kind of hero…a man that kills and is by all accounts a horrible, unfeeling person…do we even stop to think anymore that we shouldn’t be rooting for these kind of characters at all?