Love or hate Jason Statham, you can’t deny that what he does has placed him in that echelon of action heroes that are placed above the rest. I mean, he certainly fits the criteria: he’s built like a brick shit house, he’s got comic timing, he pretty much acts the same in almost every film he’s ever been in and he has memorable quirks (bald, growly) that’s made him somewhat a household name. While I would hesitate to place him on the same pedestal as a Schwarzenegger or a Stallone, he’s certainly doing better than a Van Damme or a Segal and someone out there obviously thinks he’s within the reach of Charles Bronson, because in 2011, he stepped into the shoes of action cinema’s most steely gaze for the remake of Michael Winner’s cult 70s thriller, The Mechanic.
In a career that’s seen him survive scripts written by Luc Besson, being in close proximity to Mickey Rourke and fighting a prehistoric shark the size of Godzilla’s wang, can the Stath possibly hope to weather direct comparisons to a legend who used less facial expressions than he does?
Arthur Bishop is one of those hitmen who goes the extra mile for his craft as evidenced by the complex assassination we witness him do at the start of the film. Specialising in “accidents”, fake suicides or crimes gone wrong, the organisation that he works for demands that no one suspects that his victims were actually rendered dead by a muscular bald man with a British accent. But soon after we watch him drown a Colombian Cartel boss after laying in wait for him at the bottom of his pool, we find that Bishop has grown despondent with his solitary life, but is unable to create attachments with anyone other than his handler Harry due to the stressful nature of the job.
Of course, this makes things all the more awkward when it turns out that due to a botched mission in South Africa, Harry is due to be Bishop’s next victim; but after a surprisingly understanding conversation, Arthur shoots his friend in order to make it look like a carjacking gone wrong – I mean, what are friends for, right? However, after the funeral, Arthur bumps into Harry’s troubled son, Steve, who has been plagued by consuming rage issues even before his father was murdered and who confesses to the actual culprit that he is planning on driving around that night in the hope he can shoot anyone foolish to carjack him.
Buy after stopping him, Arthur desides to kill two birds with one stone and try to simultaneously cure his loneliness and Steve’s rage by taking him under his wing and teaching his new companion to be a “Mechanic” just like him. However, Steve proves to be way too volatile to employ the light touch that Bishop’s employers insist on and after one too many blazing firefights, Bishop and Steve become the targets themselves. But with all this going on, can Bishop really trust his new friend? I mean, really?
While this remake is certainly more slick and glossy than it’s rather scrappier and experimental originator, it’s noticably less effective due some subtle changes on the script that effectively rob it of the nihilistic symmetry Bronson’s version did. To jump right into spoiler territory both both films, the decision to “Hollywood” it up removes a lot of the whallop from the punchline that sees Jan-Michael Vincent Steve kill his mustachioed teacher simply because he’s a stone cold psycho who, it turns out, is actually unaware that his father died by Arthur’s hand. Of course, that’s not the kind of down beat endings we seem to get much of these days but that slight neutering of the ending manages to remove the brutally elegant point that everything’s pointless from the ending in the hope that we might get a sequel.
However, while it’s rejigged “happier” ending might dull the teeth of the story, it turns out that if you treat The Mechanic as less of a remake and more of an unofficial attempt to adapt the Hitman video game series, which also saw a slaphead assassin go to painstaking lengths to kill his prey. While it’s not so accurate that if you were to CGI a tattoo of a barcode on the back of Statham’s skull it would be perfect, the nature of the kills themselves certainly lend themselves to the franchise far more than the two awful movies it spawned did. In fact, any movie that starts with the Stath drowning a man and then puppeteering his body to make it look like he’s still swimming can’t be all bad and as a basic, gloomy action thriller, The Mechanic proves to be a fairly harmless watch.
Statham does his usual shtick, glaring, growling and garotting with aplomb, but he simply isn’t as tragic as the original Bishop as the movie is far too preoccupied with making him look cool rather than saddling him with crippling depression and blackouts caused by immense stress. Similarly, Ben Foster’s Steve makes great use of the actor’s talent of being abnormally intense literally at all times, but his inner rage issues and his desire to lash out just isn’t as memorable as Michael-Vincent’s dead-eyed playboy who simply wants to kill things. In fact, it seems like the remake has flipped the characters in order to make Steve the internally damaged one and Arthur the dangerously cool one – and while that would make sense in the realms of a typical Jason Statham action flick, it’s actually the exact opposite of what Winner and Bronson was trying to achieve.
Of course, none of this will mean a damn thing to the majority of viewers as the original flick is something of a cult pleasure and to sever its connections to its source material means you can just sit back and enjoy the big explosions, grim tone and some genuinely gripping scenes of Bishop doing what he does best. Whether suffocating a cult leader to death with an endoscope or plotting the demise of a fellow assassin by luring him in with a chihuahua and rohypnol, you’ll actually wish their were more of these diabolically planning hit and a bit less brooding. What with matters being helmed by Simon West, you know that the action is going to be of a certain scale too – after all, it the director of Con Air can’t shoot a fireball, who can – but while the director never managed to hit the heights of that magnificently ludicrous Nic Cage masterpiece ever again, The Mechanic allows him to show that he can still manage hefty sized stunts and a final showdown that involved a stolen bus, a garbage truck and a bullet proof car that doesn’t knows what hits it is suitably brutal.
It’s got a pretty good cast too. I mean, Foster’s always been a hugely dependable character actor, especially when he’s required to be as constantly on edge as a man who hasn’t shit for five days and somehow we’ve even got Donald Sutherland in the mix as the wheelchair bound Harry and it’s a shame that the Stath has to stay locked in that grim, tough guy mode while sharing scenes with him.
Certainly a fairly diverting and undeniably grim watch, but for all it’s grit and boom, but compared to the original, this is one mechanic that should have realised that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
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