I’ve heard a smart film writer or two label 1967’s Le Samourai as being patient zero for assassin movies as we know them. When the original The Mechanic came out in 1972 the formula probably still felt pretty fresh and not quite so… formula. For a 2011 remake, this is no longer the case. After over forty years of movies about assassins, where very few have strayed very far from the original template, the whole idea has started to taste pretty stale. What we get from this remake isn’t all that bad. It works. It fits right in to what you expect from a movie about a hitman. It’s nuts and bolts filmmaking, it does things by the book, it sticks to the plan; it’s very mechanic-like. We’re not far into the film before we get some exposition about the main character’s loneliness and isolation. And soon after that he’s given a job to take out someone that he knows. And soon after that he undermines his professional, low risk modus operandi to take on a brash and cocky young protégé. Yeah, that’s right, this is that kind of movie. It goes every place we’ve ever seen a hitman movie go before: all three of them.
Our deadly protagonist is a veteran murder for hire by the name of Arthur Bishop, but for our purposes we will just call him Jason Statham, because he’s Jason Statham playing Jason Statham. In his off time he lives a solitary, but affluent life in an eye catching home secluded somewhere in the bayou. The only real contact he has is with other humans are his regular forays with a local prostitute (which seems to be haphazardly inserted into a female free film only to assure us that our main character is heterosexual) and his dealings with the two men that he takes his jobs from. He has two bosses, one a nice, wheelchair bound man played by Donald Sutherland, and the other a mean, scowling businessman played by Tony Goldwyn. Each character exists in this script for purposes that you’ve already sussed out. When we first meet Statham he is efficiently dispatching various targets. A complication comes only when a hit gets put out on a person that he knows. But things don’t get that complicated, after a second or two of mulling it over he shoots him in the chest. A second complication occurs when this dearly departed acquaintance’s son (Ben Foster) shows up and starts hounding Statham about wanting to become a hitman. Statham doesn’t do much in the role other than be a badass, but he’s got that part of his job down. Really, he is the most credible action star that we have. He was the best actor in The Expendables, which was billed as being an action movie dream team. I would go as far as to call him the king of the modern action film. The problem is, modern action films aren’t really worth a damn. I’m ready to see what Statham might be capable of is he was paired up with a talent on the level of John McTiernan. Where have all the good action directors gone?
Foster adds a bit of nervous energy to the film. His character is full of rage and vengeance thirst. Foster is good at playing emotionally conflicted. He’s the ticking time bomb with the thunderstorm of emotion raging under the surface of his taught, strained face. He drinks and smokes and rages, and if he doesn’t find a way to stop he’s going to be everyone’s undoing. It’s basically down to Foster and Jeremy Renner for all of these roles at this point and I fall more on the Foster side of things personally. I’m a Foster man. He is able to take what would have been (and honestly, mostly is) a typical Jason Statham movie and add another element of intrigue to it. Giving Statham another personality to play off of is always helpful. And what’s the deal with people smoking looking so cool? Seriously? In 2011? Why am I still so affected by how cool a guy sucking down a cigarette looks?
The main problem with the film is probably the conceit that the uber-professional Statham character would jeopardize everything that he has built his life on to take on the Foster character as a protégé in the first place. But I guess that’s how all of these movies get started. We watch what happens after the first mistake they make, the one bad choice that becomes their undoing. To watch them do their job well would just be violence porn. But the lengths these movies go to trying to paint the protagonist as an untouchable god of violence always makes their fall seem like an out of character development. I guess it’s a failure of the genre. My second complaint comes with the training that Statham puts Foster through. We don’t even get a 80s style montage of Foster’s skills growing. We see a couple images of them having fun with guns out in the woods, and then he is able to systematically dispatch opponents in the most deadly, effective manner. It’s kind of insulting, but if you tell yourself that this isn’t the sort of movie where you worry about things like that, then it’s tolerable.
What wasn’t quite so tolerable to me was the way the film pussyfoots around the fact that its protagonists are cold-blooded killers. Great lengths are taken to portray every person that Statham and Foster kills as the most deplorable scum on the Earth. They prey on young boys, young girls, they’re drug addicts, cult leaders, they deal arms to terrorists and street gangs. There’s no moral ambiguity whatsoever, none of the balls that it would take to make a real movie about hitmen. Statham and Foster are the good guys and that’s that. Don’t question the level of evil and psychosis that would be necessary to kill for a living. Turn your brain off. There is one scene where the dynamic duo are forced to take an innocent wife and daughter of a thug hostage that seemed like it was traveling into the aforementioned ballsy territory. Their interrogation of the women is brutal and hard to watch, for about a second. It looks like Statham has crossed a line and we are going to get an interesting look at what a contract killer really is; but then it all gets revealed as a trick. They weren’t torturing innocent women to get the information they needed. It was just a goof, a slight of hand, a cop out. In order to enjoy The Mechanic you have to accept that it’s a movie that’s just never going to be very interesting. It’s going to be comfortable, familiar.
So, we’ve established that we’re mostly just turning our brain off and enjoying the action in this one. How is the action then? Mostly it’s pretty enjoyable. At the very least, it builds well throughout the film. When we’re first being introduced to Statham we mostly get efficient, low violence kills. He takes someone out, makes it look like an accident, and then disappears into the night. But once Foster’s character gets introduced into the mix things start to get messier. We get a pretty over the top and cool hand-to-hand fight to the death when Foster tries his hand at his first kill. Then we get a pretty big shootout sequence and some repelling down a skyscraper stunt work during the second one. And everything coalesces into an all out siege on the bad guy’s hideout for the climax. Things get more and more exciting as we go, they don’t fall into the trap of blowing their best stuff early on and then boring in the third act. There are some pretty big blood splatters every time somebody gets shot or stabbed or whatnot, and the attempt at real, gross, R rated violence was appreciated by this reviewer; but I would be remiss not to complain about the CG nature of the blood. It feels like you’re watching someone play a video game more than it feels like you’re watching an awesome action movie. Are blood squibs really that hard to do? They’re tried, true, look great, and have been a staple of the movie industry since it’s beginning. If high profile people like Ebert are going to get on soapboxes and campaign for the end of 3D movies, could they also earmark the end of unnecessary CG into their stump speeches? If something can be done with practical effects rather than computer imagery it looks better 90% of the time, all of the time.
The camera work does the action right though. During the first scene things got a little shaky and frantic and I was worried that this was going to be one of those unwatchable modern action films that looks like it was shot by a four year old; but that wasn’t the case at all. The camera only gets handheld and moves a lot during the most kinetic scenes. And things are shot from appropriate angles and edited together with enough skill that you can always follow the characters as they travel from place to place. There aren’t any issues with unclear spatial relations and whatnot in this one. Thank God. The score is small and percussiony. It mostly stays out of the way, but during the action scenes it speeds up appropriately and helps keep things moving. There’s no overly dramatic swelling themes or action movie cheese. Everything about this film is competent, acceptable.
Decent action that was well presented, nothing too terribly botched; so with a climax that was enough of a thrill ride this could have been a really effective movie despite it’s handful of shortcomings. The ending we get keeps that from happening and ensures that The Mechanic will be remembered as a mixed bag. The final assault ends up being a blink and you missed it let down. It’s over before you know it, and slowly you start to realize that the movie isn’t over and the real climax is going to be character stuff between Statham and Foster. That sounds good on the surface. A character driven ending to an action film? That’s new and interesting. Except that it’s handled in pretty much the worst way possible. Classic noir plotting, the tropes of tragic drama, they demand that this film should go a certain way. We have a protagonist who becomes morally compromised in the first act, by the end of the third he should be systematically destroyed because of it. We have a supporting character that is driven by rage and a thirst for vengeance. A successful story demands that he should either exact that revenge or find some sort of peace; come to some new understanding. None of this happens. No lessons are learned or taught either by the characters or by the audience. Instead we get an ending that sacrifices story for macho posturing and badass imagery. It’s not so bad if you just turn your brain off and enjoy it. Just make sure that you never turn your brain on and you’ll be fine…
