All too aptly named, The Mechanic spends most of its time observing the machinery of assassination. The taciturn central character, played with customary impassiveness by Jason Statham, does eventually experience a cognitive awakening that could almost be called an emotion. But the movie is most concerned with engineering a series of encounters between hard objects — bullets, blades, screwdrivers — and soft flesh.
Nominally, The Mechanic is a remake of a 1972 Charles Bronson picture. But the movie is crisp and contemporary enough to inaugurate another franchise for Statham, who has starred in three Transporter movies, among many other showcases for his hard physique and harder demeanor.
This time, Statham is Arthur Bishop, a hit man with superhuman finesse and a perpetually unshaven mug. He works for a highly corporate assassination bureau — world headquarters in a Chicago skyscraper — that specializes in murders that can’t be classified as homicides. Arthur’s victims appear to have drowned, or had heart attacks, maybe drunk too many Red Bulls. (Actually, that last one is my invention, though I wouldn’t put it past the film.)
Arthur’s longtime mentor is Harry McKenna, a wheelchair-using military veteran (and a zesty cameo for Donald Sutherland). The murder corporation’s CEO — known simply as Dean, portrayed by Tony Goldwyn and looking amusingly like Timothy Geithner — decrees that McKenna must be dispatched. After the deed is done, Arthur experiences a twinge of empathy for McKenna’s screw-up of a son, Steve (Ben Foster).
Like most movie hit men, Arthur has no human attachments (although he does always visit the same hooker). No one ever visits the tasteful bachelor pad, hidden in a Louisiana bayou, where Arthur proves his discernment by listening to Schubert on a high-end sound system, complete with vacuum-tube amplifier.