If you take a pinch of the Professional and a liberal helping of the Transporter franchise and layer them into a remake of a 1972 Charles Bronson and Jan-Michael Vincent vehicle you will get the Mechanic and it is just as glorious as all that sounds.

Arthur Bishop (Jason Statham) is a Mechanic, an elite assassin hired for difficult jobs that often require zero residual presence. He is cold, clean and calculated and works for a particular company that deals in those particular services. His life is in order and everything is going along swimmingly until he finds his next contract is his boss and mentor Harry McKenna (Donald Sutherland) who allegedly has sold out his own operatives for financial gain. A lot of movies would have veered off into Bishop turning on his employers but instead he checks it out and kills his mentor. He makes it look like a car jacking and when he finds Steve McKenna (Ben Foster), his mentor’s son, out trolling for car jackers to kill, Bishop decides to train the boy to be an assassin himself. When he learns that one of the dead operatives isn’t so dead, things go really pear shaped really quickly.

There is a lot in the The Mechanic that we’ve seen before and not just because it is a remake. Arthur Bishop is one costume change away from the Transporter’s Frank Martin and a good number of the story beats have been done before many times. What sets the Mechanic apart, though, is that the way things unfold are surprising and creative. It is a strange movie in that way and you can see they wanted to do something unique but had to stay within the confines of the original material. I think I would have preferred they take the basic idea and make it into an original property but what is here is generally pretty fun to watch.

The action, which takes awhile to kick in, is as creative as it is intense. It is safe to say that most people going to this movie are going to see Jason Statham kick a bunch of ass in a bunch of awesome ways and that audience will not be disappointed. Once the action kicks off it doesn’t let up and offers a lot more gore and grittiness than I was expecting. You aren’t getting Rambo or the Expendables level gore but it is a damn site more brutal than a PG-13 effort. What was better than the gore was the creativity. There are only so many gun fights you can see in movies, particularly ones based on elite hitmen, without them feeling stale and retread but the action and violence in the Mechanic manages to feel fresh and exciting. A large reason for this is director Simon West has long since outgrown the Michael Bay mimicry of Con Air and has found his own style and the confidence to deliver it. Apparently that style is ‘make sure everything looks fucking badass.’

The badassery doesn’t just belong to Statham either. Ben Foster’s Steve is an atypical hitman student in that, while he makes mistakes, he is very competent and does just as many awesome things. I like Foster a lot and have followed his career for a long time. He tends to be a chameleon and often the only through line to be found across his characters is that the performance is terrific. He brings that to this role as well and adds more layers than a character in an action movie would usually deserve but never sacrifices any cool to do it. It is very nice to see a student that isn’t a bumbling idiot, or at least one who when he does screw everything up is good enough to take care of himself.

Statham is Statham here and if you like him you will like him here. I have a hard time understanding how someone COULDN’T like him but the world is a crazy place. He is pretty much just doing his thing in the Mechanic so if you like what that thing is then you will be well satisfied. If you don’t like what Statham does then you want to avoid the movie altogether because nothing is going to win you over.

Kind of going along with the above point about Statham, it is important to understand that in all of the badass action and violence you aren’t going to find much realism here. If you are looking for some kind of look at what being a hitman might actually be like then you want to look elsewhere. This is a straight up action movie and it is pretty unrepentant about it. It isn’t as ridiculous as the Transporter movies or as batshit insane as the Crank pictures but you have to take a lot of the things they do with a big grain of salt. And that is okay because if you have seen a trailer for this thing it is pretty obvious what it is that you are getting. There is also a bunch of sex and nudity and that was pretty awesome too.

Not everything went right with the Mechanic though. Structurally, the film is lopsided with very little action in the first half and then exploding at the end. That would be okay given that it is generally still interesting in the beginning but West throws in some plodding establishing shots of Statham doing not much in particular or just lingering on moments that drag on too long. I understand that these scenes were meant to inform about the characters but some tightening in editing would have really helped out here. Also, in some of the hand to hand sequences the camera is kept too tight on the fighters which keeps the audience from really seeing what is going on. I understand that this technique can go a long way in hiding an actor who isn’t very good at the fighting and making him look good but Jason Statham has the goods and it is a shame we don’t get to see wider shots of the fighting.

Conlcusion [8.5 out of 10]

The Mechanic is a very good action movie that tries really hard to elevate itself to great but is hamstrung structurally by virtue of being a remake and chugs along somewhat in its first act. It isn’t as crazy ridiculous as other films of this type but it will provide plenty of over the top giggles for those looking for silly action but it works well enough to give some satisfaction to people looking for a more serious action film. The bottom line here is that if you want to watch Jason Statham be a badass there are much worse ways to do it…which is to say by watching a film he isn’t in because he is awesome.