The Mechanic (1972) – Review

When you pair up the names Charles Bronson and Michael Winner, your brain should instantly drift towards conflicting memories – not unlike an unsettling ‘Nam flashback – of the work they did together on the routinely unpleasant Death Wish series. While the validity concerning politics of the continuing adventures of Paul Kersey will no doubt be debated until the cows come home, years before, the pair made The Mechanic, a movie blissfully free of any moral debate quite simply because there wasn’t any.
Concerning the solitary, soul eroding world of the professional assassin (aka. a Mechanic), Winner delivered a movie that, in a rare move for him, actually traded on a fair bit subtlety while simultaneously devolving into running shotgun battles, motorcycle chases and car explosions at a moments notice. It also seemed to be a plum role for Bronson too, his trademark, craggy, thousand yard stare seemingly perfect for the role of a hitman trapped in the throes of depression, but even though time has mostly forgotten the film, the mark of a good Mechanic is to always lurk in the background waiting to strike.

Arthur Bishop makes an incredibly comfortable living working as a meticulous killer for hire for a secret international criminal organisation, but the general distrusting nature of his business and the emotional pressure of his lifestyle means that he’s constantly submerged in the depths of a deep depression with a side order of existential crisis. In fact, his mental health is in such a disarray, his course of antidepressants and a fake relationship with a call-girl isn’t enough to stop him randomly passing out because of the stress.
However, Bishop seems to find an unlikely source of salvation after he’s tasked fakes a heart attack of of one of the organisation’s heads and subsequently befriends his son, Steve McKenna.
Steve is narcissistic, callous, highly ambitious and is sick to death of his bohemian friend circle who mostly proves to be a cabal of freaky beatniks and his growing friendship with Bishop ends up giving both men a focus they desperately need. While Bishop takes a teacherly role which borders on patriarchal and gives him the human contact he so sorely needs, Steve gets guidance and focus in a time when he could just get lazy and fat spending his father’s immense fortune.
However, the fact that Bishop has suddenly changed from his set ways and taken on a cold-eyed protégée makes those that employ him slightly nervous and their fears are almost realised when it seems that Bishop can’t impart his deadly knowledge and ensure a supernaturally clean kill like before.
And yet the grizzled hitman perseveres, clutching at the purpose that taking Steve under his wing has given him – but can Steve actually be trusted; especially considering that he’s being trained to murder people without a trace? When the organisation they work for seems to be setting them up and the bullets and the flames start flying, we’ll soon find out.

Michael Winner has often been accused (not exactly unjustly, either) of leaning into crass sensationalism whether the movie requires it or not, but while the fact that he directed a version of Agatha Christie’s Appointment With Death without a single rape scene or random explosion, I guess we have to give him the benefit of the doubt. However, there’s something about his frequent unions with the emotional monolith known as Charles Bronson that tended to focus him somewhat while still letting him free in indulge his more adolescent urges. If you need any more proof of this, then the first fifteen minutes of The Mechanic is a hell of a good place to start as Winner displays the same attention to detail and patience displayed in later years by the likes of David Fincher or Brian De Palma.
The opening of the movie is literally us watching Bronson’s stoney faced Arthur Bishop meticulously arranging an “accidental” death by dicking about with his victim’s gas line and then igniting it with a rifle shot from an apartment across the street. It’s wordless, it offers no explanation as to who Bishop is or why he’s doing what he’s doing and it simply requires you to watch along and the actor creates his character simply by effortlessly engineering another man’s doom for money.
However, once the job is done, both Brinson and Winner finally let us into Bishop’s world and despite the fact that he surrounds himself with art and beauty, it isn’t enough to stem the flow of loneliness and depression that gotten to a point when his body is physically starting to rebel. Of course, Bronson manages to show all this while somehow saying as little as possible while changing his expression practically zero times throughout the entirety of the film (even his grins look fairly painful fir his character to pull off). There were as few performers as ruthlessly controlled as Bronson and so there wasn’t anyone in Hollywood anywhere near qualified enough to match the man when it came to emoting through an impenetrable, manly armour, but you have to give Jan Michael Vincent all the credit in the world for trying to match him steely glance for steely glance.

Similarly prematurely toughed into leather by his outlook on the works, Vincent’s hungry Steve bizarrely looks to me as if Josh Hartnett was playing Billy Drago in some sort of biopic by the way that this handsome young man has so much shit going on behind those constantly squinting eyed and part of the fun of the film is that you genuinely have no clue where his character is coming from for most of the film. Is he aware that Bishop killed his father and is learning the skills from the man who did it to get revenge? Is he clueless about the murder and just wants to be a hitman? Is all of this a bluff and he also just wants to experience a connection with another human being; or is ir a mixture of all three?
Well, while you’re figuring it out, Winner obviously thinks that by being so subtle, he’s earned the right to suddenly drop in some nicely loud action sequences in here and there which prove to be genuinely bassass to boot. Growing up, I was foolishly under the impression that action movies where mainly an invention of the 80s and that anything before that was merely a thriller with extra gunplay and car chases – but The Mechanic nixes all of that by blowing up speed boats, blowing up motorcycles and having Bronson and Vincent blow away thugs while running around in wetsuits and flippers. Action this most certainly be.

And then there’s the ending, which somehow proves to go exactly how you think it will and yet still manages to surprise you by being horribly nihilistic and awesomely cool all at the same time. In fact, Winner approaches the material in such a deliberately esoteric way, it seems he’s trying to invoke feelings of John Boorman’s stylishly maniacal Point Blank which also sees an alpha male struggling with his place in life.
At turns meticulous and frenetic, The Mechanic proves that there’s more to the Winner/Bronson partnership than just Death Wish and the pair fare much better when dealing with troubled villains than Righteous heroes.
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