Mechanic - Resurrection
Director: Dennis Gansel
Stars: Jason Statham, Jessica Alba, Tommy Lee Jones
Duration: 98 mins
Class: 15
KRS Releasing Ltd

The latest in Jason Statham’s oeuvre sees the action star return to the character he recreated in 2011’s The Mechanic, itself a remake of the 1972 film of the same name.

The Mechanic is the name the otherwise rather ordinarily-named Arthur Bishop goes by. Yet, he has no ordinary job. Bishop is a skilled, highly-paid assassin whose unique selling point is his ability to make his kills look like accidents. You may recall, if you saw the first film; that Bishop, tired of the assassin’s life, faked his own death in order to lead a quiet, anonymous life. He has succeeded in doing so and, as the film starts, we find him living on a lovely boat in Brazil.

However, a quiet meal in his favourite restaurant is interrupted by a woman who has a message for him from an old acquaintance Crain (Sam Hazeldine) who threatens to kill him if he doesn’t carry out three assassinations.

Bishop refuses, and flees to Thailand to take refuge with an old friend Mei (Michelle Yeoh). But a chance encounter with the mysterious Gina (Jessica Alba) brings him once more face-to-face with his nemesis, who leaves him with no choice but to carry out the job.

Characterisation across the board is notable by its absence

From the moment Bishop fights his way out of that first restaurant encounter, you know exactly how things are going to pan out. The story, by screenwriter Phillip Shelby, lacks little by way of tension or suspense. The dialogue is amateur and laughable for the most part, while director Dennis Gansel’s handling of the action is pretty much by-the-numbers.

The whole is peppered every few minutes with a fight scene in which Bishop uses knives, guns and assorted other weapons – oftentimes, his bare hands – to take out mobs of henchmen. These are all carried out with clinical and humdrum precision.

In the meantime, the preposterousness of the set pieces that depict each of the three kills reaches ridiculous levels as Bishop gets in and breaks out of a maximum security prison with the ease with which I stroll down to the village piazza for the first kill.

For the second kill, he effortlessly climbs up a very tall skyscraper and sabotages a hanging swimming pool without being seen. He breaks into a fortified building without breaking a sweat for the third.

Each segment of the story has plot holes big enough for one of the many luxury yachts on display (many of which sadly get blown up) to sail through. Speaking of which, I still haven’t figured out how Crain managed to sail his yacht from Sydney, Australia to Bulgaria, Europe in a matter of hours… but logic was clearly not high on the filmmakers’ agenda.

But, at least, we get to catch a glimpse of Statham’s considerable diving and swimming skills – he is a former member of Britain’s National Diving Squad, after all.

Characterisation across the board is notable by its absence. The people Bishop is targeted to kill are once again ‘very bad people’ – a notorious drug lord, a child trafficker and an arms dealer, so we don’t care much about their fate.

Unfortuantely, we also care little for the other characters, including the one-dimensional damsel in distress played by Alba mostly in bikinis. Her character is given some ‘depth’ because she works with Cambodian orphans. Michelle Yeoh adds a pinch of gravitas to proceedings and Tommy Lee Jones adds some pizazz as colourful arms dealer Max Adams, although you do wonder what it is that makes actors of his calibre accept these jobs…

Statham undoubtedly obtained legions of new fans with the spot-on send-up of his own persona with his fabulously funny performance in last summer’s hit comedy Spy, showing that there may be more to him than that one character he ordinarily portrays, but he falls back to his usual bag of tricks here and there is the sense here that he is simply going through the motions. His indisputable charisma is  unable to overcome the film’s many weaknesses.   If he is determined to continuously resurrect the taciturn, tough, daring, resourceful, assassin-with-a-moral compass he has now played too many times to count, he is going to need much better material.

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