Following on from the ‘The Mechanic’, a film that was pretty okay but not as good as it could have been, ‘The Mechanic: Resurrection’ is Dennis Gansel’s latest film starring Jason Statham who again plays Arthur Bishop, a hitman who has quite a knack for causing the ‘accidental death’. He’s taken on a new identity, Santos, and it all seems to be going rather swimmingly until a rather angry yet illogical woman manages to find him. She needs him to take out three men on behalf of supervillain Crain (Sam Hazeldene). Bishop refuses, gets into a bit of a violent situation as expected, and then finds himself the rescuer of Gina, played by Jessica Alba.
Plot device Gina throws a bit of a spanner in the works here – it turns out that she runs an orphanage in Cambodia, and Crain has threatened to torch the whole thing unless Bishop gets on and does the job. Reluctantly, he decides to go along with it, and has to plan three extremely clever accidental deaths in a short space of time to ensure that both himself and the orphanage remain intact.
‘The Mechanic: Resurrection: clearly had a budget – from the very beginning the image is colourful and slick, and very easy on the eye. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for the editing, acting, or writing. I’ve got to admit that I didn’t have high hopes considering the cast (Alba has never been a particularly entrancing actress, and we all know Statham’s reputation), but then they weren’t really given much to work with, as seen above. The storyline wasn’t really that clever, even for the modern day action film, and some of the lines were embarrassing to listen to. Let’s just say that TV Tropes would have a field day with this one.
It wasn’t all completely terrible though – the deaths of each wanted man by Bishop were quite well thought out, and offered just enough entertainment to keep me from pressing the stop button. I preferred the calmer scenes to the action shots as they were a little bit more realistic, but there wasn’t really anything that stood out. The predictability got a bit dull after a while; there’s been so many similar action movies out there that after watching a couple you kind of just know what’s going to happen, and this certainly rings true for a few of Statham’s other movies.
The main problem was that it was just so unrealistic. Not just the story, but the individual scenes – 5 minutes in we see an action-packed chase involving a chair lift, yet Bishop is amazingly able to escape by jumping out of the lift onto a rather convenient paraglider that just happens to be floating past in exactly the right spot. It’s the little things like this that are the problem as they just make it hard to believe, and at that point I lose interest.
With clunky editing and a below par script, ‘The Mechanic: Resurrection’ isn’t particularly clever, and is nowhere near as good as the first one, which still had a lot to learn. If you want to see a Statham film that’s a great watch then just stick to ones like ‘Snatch’ and ‘The Transporter’ – the only good thing about this one was that he’d settled for an English accent. 2/5
★★☆☆☆
Hannah Read
The Mechanic Ressurection at CeX
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