The Mechanic

STAAAAAATHAAAAAAAAAAAAM!!!!

It's Jason Statham Time! I feel a bit of a dual standard coming on here. Just last week, I gave Natalie Portman a right old slating for not having more than one facial expression, and yet here I am, enjoying the work of Jason Statham, who has only *ever* had one expression himself. However, for some reason, I am always entertained by it. Probably because that expression is Faintly Pissed Off. He is never more than Faintly Pissed Off, he is never less than Faintly Pissed Off. Having sex? Faintly Pissed Off. Confronting the man who killed your best friend? Faintly Pissed Off. Whatever it is, the impression he gives is that there's something he'd rather be doing, and the eight million people he's about to maim and dismember are just an irritating distraction. I would love to know what that thing is that Jason Statham would rather be doing is, but we have never seen it on screen, and I doubt we ever will. Though I would love it to be revealed to be something like painting Napoleonic wargaming miniatures, or growing marrows in his allotment.

I suppose if he were in Black Swan, I'd have some reservations about his unwillingness to waver for an instant from that singular emotion. But he's not. He's in The Mechanic. A Mechanic, it seems, is a specific form of hitman, one of those craftsmen who knows every way in the world to kill someone, make it look like an accident, make it look like suicide, make it look like someone else did it, make it painless, make it messy; if you want to order from the A' La Carte menu of murder, you hire a Mechanic.

Jason Statham is a Mechanic, and Donald Sutherland is his mentor, now an old man in a wheelchair. Donald has a son, Ben Foster, who's a bit off the rails. Perhaps inevitably, once he is revealed to be Jason's only friend, Donald is dead in pretty short order, leaving his son grieving and full of rage, and Jason grieving and Faintly Pissed Off about it. Ben needs something in his life to give it meaning, and that turns out to be being a Mechanic also. So, Jason agrees to train him.

Cue a series of hits which form an apprenticeship for Ben, in which we basically see his desire for violence and bloodshed makes him ill-suited for the subtleties of the Mechanic trade, but nonetheless an effective, if messy killer.

Then, of course, the true facts of the circumstances of Donald's death come out, which puts Jason and Ben at odds with their former employer, with typically "everybody in this film who's had a speaking role so far ends up dead" results. The ending, which I'm not going to get into in too much detail is a bit unsatisfying, because while it defys the standards of the genre, which is often a good thing, does so to no real apparent purpose, leaving us really just thinking "So... now what?"

Until we get there, though, it's a great, classic style thriller, in which somehow both condemns and glorifies the amorality of the contract killer. Something which particularly struck me; Jason has one of those stereotypical hitman modernist design houses, filled with modernist furniture, macbooks and audiophile hifi equipment, but which hasn't a hint that a real human lives there. Later in the film, we see the interior of another, rival mechanic's apartment, and it's just the same. This is the message, the job pays well, you can buy all the exquisitely tasteful things with it you like, but it's in lieu of having a real life.

So, it's a typically stylish, typically amoral, typically violent Jason Statham film, and if you like a bit of that, then this is another one. If you don't like that, well, this is still another one.