"The Mechanic" Review

7/10

"The Mechanic" Review

2011
A Simon West Film
Protagonists:
Jason Statham
Ben Foster
Antagonist: Tony Goldwyn
Run-time: 1 hour 33 minutes

The film follows a trained assassin who does what he is told, and his trade mark is arranging his hits to look like accidents, or natural causes, or shifts the suspicion onto someone else. But after he is made to kill someone he knows, he is faced with the ruin of the son of his friend; to compensate in some way, Arthur Bishop(Jason Statham) takes the young man under his wing and teaches him the skills of the trade.

The original film("The Mechanic" 1972) of this remake follows many of the key moments captured in this one, and both movies are products of their age in that the original had less gruesome and graphic displays of deaths and a more lengthy car chase, while the remake was bordering on hyper-realism in some parts and followed the standard Hollywood glamour in others and was packed with physical stunts that might only have been seen in Hong Kong Fu films at the time of the original.

This film is definitely made for the guys; female nudity, sexually explicit scenes, explosions, blood, fancy cars, guns, high-risk-near-impossible-stunts. This film has all of those plus some homosexual reference, most likely to balance out the excitement of the rest of the film and make it more contemporary.

I would not recommend this film to anyone below the age of fifteen years, but I know from experience that age limits on films are more of a challenge than a deterrent.

All in all, not a very realistic piece, but very entertaining.