24 Lies a Second: United Statham

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United Statham

It is with great sadness that I have to report that Mechanic: Resurrection is still not available to view at any screen within a sensible distance of the garret. And so it falls to me to try to find something to fill the void. But what could reasonably take the place of the review of a new Jason Statham film? Well, after much deliberation, I have decided it will have to be a review of an old Jason Statham film, and – it seems only logical – why not take a look at the first Mechanic, from 2011?

Looking back through the collected works, it occurs to me that I may, on occasion, have come across as just a bit snarky and oh-ho-ho about the life and works of Jason Statham – ‘my kitchen can act better' (about The Transporter), ‘a nuanced performer he is not' (Transporter 2), ‘Statham in genuinely good movie shocker' (Killer Elite), and so on. I think I am guilty of misrepresenting myself, as I've hardly ever seen a Statham-led movie I haven't enjoyed on some level, but more importantly doing the man himself a disservice: Statham is clearly aware of his own range as a performer and operates inside it exceedingly well. He hasn't quite made a gilt-edged classic yet, but when it comes to complete dogs his record is not too bad, provided you overlook things like 13 and Revolver.

On the other hand, it might not go amiss were he to stretch himself just a little more in his choice of roles – because long stretches of Simon West's The Mechanic are virtually interchangeable with bits from other Statham movies, or other recent action movies generally. It has the same colour-saturated cinematography, the same kind of graphic design, the same aesthetic, the same sensibility – with the insertion of a bare minimum of new material I suspect you could edit The Mechanic, Colombiana, either of the first two Transporters and Haywire together into one sprawling six-hour epic, so very similar are all of these movies.

In The Mechanic Jason Statham plays… well, officially, someone called Arthur Bishop, but really he's just playing his standard Jason Statham Character. (There's a broad unity between most of his roles, moreso even than with the average action movie star.) For the benefit of newcomers, the Jason Statham Character is a highly skilled and extremely dangerous mercenary, who is also either blessed or saddled with a strict code of personal honour which he does his best to abide by at all times. He has feelings, but most of the time he knows better than to show or act upon them – except when the plot demands it, of course. In this movie the Jason Statham Character is a professional assassin who specialises in invisible killings (making it look like an accident, in other words).

The Jason Statham Character's code is stretched, however, when he is called upon to terminate his own mentor, Harry (Donald Sutherland), who has apparently gone bad. He initially demurs from this, but the client – another member of the same nebulous organisation – is insistent and makes the point that surely the Jason Statham Character would prefer to do it himself, and be sure that Harry doesn't suffer unnecessarily. Harry himself expresses relief on the same point when the deed is actually done – there's a strange commingling of sentiment and brutality here which I found rather creepy, to be honest.

Anyway, motivated largely by guilt, the Jason Statham Character takes on Harry's troubled son Steve (Ben Foster) as an apprentice – not bothering to tell him that he killed his father, of course. Needless to say, Steve has issues of all kinds, which perhaps mean he's not the best person for this line of work. And what will happen if he ever finds out the truth about his father's demise…?

Well, The Mechanic is a solidly competent action thriller which should satisfy fans of both the genre and Statham himself. That it isn't anything more is a shame, because West has previously shown himself to be a superior director and there are flashes here of what could have been a rather more accomplished movie.

Part of the problem is that the movie could really use another fifteen or twenty minutes to add onto the relatively brief running time: for most of its length the film is building up the relationship between Bishop and Steve, and at the same time increasing one's expectations of what will kick off when – inevitably – Steve learns the truth about his father's death. One kind of expects the climax of the movie to be an extended battle of wits and skill between master and apprentice. Suffice to say it's nothing of the sort; the bulk of the movie turns out to revolve around a seen-this-before hero-is-screwed-over-by-his-own-employers plot, with the stuff you've been expecting handled in a very cursory way almost as an afterthought.

So the plot is a bit lopsided and doesn't deliver on what it appears to be promising. On the other hand, what it delivers instead is a series of effective action sequences and character bits, slickly assembled and presented. Some of it is a little far-fetched – it's a fairly big ask to have as total a professional as Bishop decide to take a loose cannon like Steve on as a trainee – but the script and (to be fair to him) Statham both work hard to make Bishop's guilt (and thus his desire to help Harry's son) plausible. As I mentioned, there's nothing really very new going on here, but what does happen is playing to the strengths of the performers.

And, as I mentioned, there are moments that lift the film briefly above the average – early on we see Bishop meeting a woman in a bar, they dance, it then transpires they're lovers – and you think, ah ha, she's the girlfriend who doesn't know what his job is, she's going to get caught in the middle of this and force him to reappraise his lifestyle. But almost instantly the film kicks all this out from under you: she's simply a prostitute Bishop regularly uses, and for all that she's the top-billed woman she's barely in the film (no pun intended). Your expectation of the worst kinds of cliche is, refreshingly, not met. This kind of intelligence in a genre movie is welcome no matter how fleetingly it manifests itself.

This is a movie with a slightly harder edge than many action films, but not to the point where it ever becomes too gruelling or realistic to be entertaining. That said, there's a slightly lurid flavour to it in a couple of places – a couple of incidental victims of the two hitmen both turn out to be sex offenders, for no other reason than to reassure the audience that they really do deserve to be executed. I can really do without this kind of material, to be honest: a dumb action movie it may be, but this just struck me as salacious and unnecessary.

Apart from this there was very little in The Mechanic I found myself taking exception to and a lot that I rather enjoyed. I must confess that a little more of Statham himself, properly in action, wouldn't have gone amiss, but his actual performances these days are more than competent enough to lead a movie with the minimum of martial arts nonsense being required. This movie doesn't quite give you exactly what it suggests it will, but it comes close enough to be satisfying.

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