The Mechanic – movie review

I like Ben Foster, and the premise to The Mechanic seemed really cool, so I was looking forward to seeing it. However, the movie was not as exciting as I had hoped and actually left me wishing I could get that part of my life back.

Action movies should not be only an hour and a half long, so I should have realized up front that there was going to be something flawed with The Mechanic. The first part of the movie felt like two different stand-alone short movies that just happened to work together–the story of an assassin who is hired to take out his mentor, and a son trying to come to grips with his relationship with his father after the father’s death. Then the movie keeps going. It was really hard to get into, and at times it just didn’t make any sense.

The biggest issue I had with the movie is that there didn’t seem to be any character growth. Steve (Ben Foster) acted the same way throughout the movie, and Bishop (Jason Statham) acted the way you would expect. You don’t even have hopes or fears for these characters.  Steve McKenna is the son of Arthur Bishop’s mentor who has decided that he wants to be a “mechanic,” too. Steve wasn’t all bad. He wasn’t a flat character, and his emotions were there on his eyes. You could tell when he was angry, betrayed, happy and all of that. However, Steve tried too hard to be a badass, and as much as I like Ben Foster, he just does not pull it off well.

Jason Statham does play a cold, calculating hit man very well; however, I felt the character of Arthur was flat. He never has any emotions, and even though he hints at times that this is not the case, we still never see an emotion. This is a very boring character to watch, because he doesn’t really go through anything.  Donald Sutherland was Harry McKenna, Bishop’s mentor. I actually liked Sutherland’s performance. He was always prepared for everything, and even when Bishop shows up to kill him, he’s not that surprised. He was level headed, but, at the same time, it was clear that he did have emotions when he talked about his son. I wish this movie had been about him and ended with his murder, because Harry was the most interesting character in the entire movie.

There were only three explosions in the movie, and only one of them was cool. Everything in the movie seemed to be gratuitous, from sex scenes to heads exploding under bullets. The movie just felt like it was trying way too hard to be cool, and it unfortunately fell flat. There were some funny parts, but there weren’t enough, and on the whole I just felt like I wasted an hour and a half of my life.

Overall, The Mechanic is not a movie I would recommend. If you really want to see it, I would wait to rent it. It had sex and violence that weren’t integral to the story, the characters were flat and had no growth, and it wasn’t an easy movie to get into. The Mechanic was a waste of my life that I can never get back.