The mechanic movie action video

The Mechanic is a 2011 American action thriller film starring Jason Statham as the title character. Directed by Simon West.

The Mechanic cast and crew

Directed by
Simon West       



Jason Statham   
   
Ben Foster   
   
Tony Goldwyn   
   
Donald Sutherland   

Jeff Chase   

Mini Anden   

James Logan   
   
Eddie J. Fernandez   
   
Joshua Bridgewater   
   
John McConnell   

Christa Campbell   

Joel Davis   
   
Mark Nutter   
   
Ardy Brent Carlson   

The Mechanic overview

 If you can say one thing certain about the stateof Hollywood today it would be that the studios love remaking popular films (they also like bilking the public out of an extra three bucks for horrible 3D presentation but that’s another story).  “The Karate Kid.”  “True Grit.”  “3:10 to Yuma.”  In 1972 United Artist’s Christmas present to film fans was “The Mechanic,” a movie with an amazing pedigree.  Written by Lewis John Carlino, who would also write the screenplays for such great films as “Seconds,” “The Great Santini” and “Resurrection.”  Directed by the very (in my opinion) underrated Michael Winner, who did “Death Wish” and the great Robert Mitchum as Phillip Marlowe film “The Big Sleep.”   And starring the actor every man in America, including my father, longed to be like:  Charles Bronson.  Almost four decades later “The Mechanic” is back.  And he isn’t the worse for wear.

Arthur Bishop (Statham) is a mechanic.  No, he can’t fix your car (well, he actually is restoring one on his off days so I guess technically he can).  What he fixes are “problems.”  And he fixes them in the simplest way possible.  His assignments come to him through his long time friend Harry (Donald Sutherland), who mentored him in his early days.  Harry has a son, Steven (Foster), a hot head who is much more re-active then he is pro-active!  Driven by a similar cause, Steven asks Arthur to teach him the tricks of the trade.  Arthur reluctantly agrees and Steven seems to have a knack for the job.  But when a secret is discovered the relationship between the two men could be changed forever.

Director West proved he knew how to stage great on-screen action with his very first film, “Con Air.”  He maintains that touch here, beginning the film with a pre-credit scene that could have come out of a James Bond film.  Statham has slowly become this generations’ Bruce Willis, combining a quiet and sly screen persona with the ability to kick major ass when called upon.  Let me qualify my James Bond comparison here.  I’m not saying that Statham is Daniel Craig.  But he’s also not George Lazenby!  Foster, who played a hot head in the remake of the above mentioned “3:10 to Yuma” plays another one here, though the persona fits the character perfectly.  As the main man who calls the shots, Tony Goldwyn is an even smugger version of the guy he played twenty years ago in “Ghost.”  This has been a banner year for Goldwyn, who also directed the film “Conviction,” a film I greatly enjoyed.

Of course every remake can’t help but be compared to the original.  But that being said I can say that this version of “The Mechanic” is a worthy companion to the Bronson flick that preceded it.

The Mechanic review

In the quick, capable, thoroughly bloody action film The Mechanic, Jason Statham plays Arthur Bishop, a seasoned professional who kills people for a living. If you’re thinking this is not exactly a stretch for the star of the Transporter films and longtime Guy Ritchie muse, ask yourself if you really want to see Statham play a befuddled professor or a distracted dad. Playing a tight-lipped, brutally efficient assassin is his gift, and if you have no objection to the sensation that the copious gore his characters generate threatens fly off the screen and land sloppily in your lap, this gift is yours to enjoy.

Arthur is, in the film’s terminology, a mechanic: an assassin who carries out assignments for a nameless syndicate with a seemingly endless target list. He has two bosses, one of whom, Dean (Tony Goldwyn) — a buttoned up creep who looks like he’d be right at home on Capitol Hill — he barely tolerates. But Arthur is very fond of his old mentor Harry McKenna (Donald Sutherland). The wheelchair-bound, rheumy-eyed Harry returns his affection, even expressing some paternal concern — upon Arthur’s return from Colombia, where he’d neatly dispatched a drug lord in the film’s opening set piece — that the hitman needs a companion. Not long after, a cruel twist of the trade leaves Harry dead and lands Arthur exactly that — in the form of his mentor’s estranged son Steve (Ben Foster, who starred alongside Woody Harrelson in last year’s The Messenger), a hothead intent on avenging his father’s murder.

The Mechanic, directed by Simon West (Tomb Raider), is a remake of a 1972 Charles Bronson film of the same name. Like the 70s icon, Statham is the strong silent type; but while Bronson played the MacGyver of assassins (in the movie’s first hit, he takes out his mark using a gas stove, a book and a teabag), Statham’s Arthur has a tendency to get his hands bloody. Emotionally though, he’s a little softer — guilt ridden, for example, over one contract that Bronson’s Arthur didn’t even blanch at. It’s that guilt which drives him to mentor Steve McKenna; he’s trying to do dead Harry a favor by at least arming this loose cannon with some skills. Bronson’s Arthur, in contrast, is motivated to mentor Steve (played in 1972 by the ludicrously pretty Jan-Michael Vince) because he appreciates his cool criminal pathology. “You seem to have the aptitude,” Bronson says.

The new Steve has less aptitude than a vampire-like thirst for blood and a dangerous bravado. He’s the definition of the unprofessional, shaking off Arthur’s slick, impossible-to-trace killing methods in favor of all-out bludgeoning. After he makes a stomach-turning mess of his first assignment, in which he plays convincing bait for a gay mark, we have no confidence in Steve as a pupil. It seems uncharacteristic of Arthur to put himself at risk by continuing to keep Steve under his wing. Nonetheless, we’re grateful, because the interplay between dry Arthur and crazy, caustic Steve is what makes the movie fun. “Couldn’t you have found us someone more attractive to spy on?” Steve complains to Arthur midway through their stakeout of an obese religious guru.

Foster, a slight, bandy-legged actor whose intensity makes up for his lack of pretty features, is just the foil Statham needs. Whereas Foster is a deeply authentic actor — watch his eyes in the scene where he quizzes Arthur about what it’s like to kill someone he knows; he plays it like there’s an Oscar on the line — Statham generally seems deeply authentic only when he’s strangling someone. But when reacting to Foster he practically brims with emotion (on the Statham scale, at least). It’s the classic case of an excellent tennis player elevating the game of his opponent.

The stunts and effects are fairly typical (except perhaps for a leap from a skyscraper that felt impressively, disturbingly real) and there’s one of those climaxes involving explosions, machine guns and countless wrecked cars in an urban center (entirely unpoliced, naturally) that did nothing for me but will doubtless get the pulses of plenty of 14 year-old boys racing. I hung on though, because I wanted to see mentor and mentee work out their differences. In the original, no one gets out alive. Would today’s natural born killers go merrily off into the sunset together? The only things approaching a sunset glow here are the fireball explosions, but the film’s resolution, like the rest of the action porn, has a sly, likeable quality.

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