MECHANIC: RESURRECTION (2016) ** ½
After faking his death at the end of The Mechanic, Jason Statham has been busy living a quiet life in Rio de Janeiro on a houseboat. Someone tries to coerce him into pulling off an assassination, and he has to beat the ever-living snot out of them. He then heads off to Thailand where he hangs out with Michelle Yeoh and tries to lay low for a while. Naturally, he winds up helping Jessica Alba, who is also being blackmailed by the same villain. When she is kidnapped, he agrees to perform three seemingly impossible assassinations (they all have to look like accidents) for the bad guy in order to get her back.
Statham looks comfortable enough while lounging around on a houseboat and occasionally busting heads. In fact, the opening scenes are almost like Statham's audition tape to play Travis McGee in an adaptation of The Deep Blue Good-By. The opening sequence itself is badass. The fight scene in the restaurant is great as Statham beats the crap out of people in a bar using a table and shoves one guy’s face into a flaming grill. When he is cornered, he escapes by jumping onto a hang glider that just so happened to be passing by.
This entire sequence is worthy of a Bond movie. After that, things get a bit slow. Since the slow stretches of the film revolve around Jessica Alba in a bikini, I’d say there are worse ways to waste your time.
The middle act involves Statham carrying out the three assassinations. The first one finds him staging a prison break using chewing gun bombs, exploding cigarettes, and shark repellent. (No matter how uneven the film gets, you have to respect it for stealing from Batman: The Movie.) The second assassination is reminiscent of Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol as Statham scales a giant glass skyscraper to kill a man in his swimming pool. This sequence is goofy, mostly because the swimming pool is so unsafe to begin with. (It juts out hilariously far from the penthouse with seemingly no support.) It’s kind of easy to kill that guy because that pool was already an accident waiting to happen. The last sequence involves Statham breaking into an eccentric arms dealer’s elaborate panic room. Since the eccentric arms dealer is played by Tommy Lee Jones at his all-time weirdest, it’s hard to hate.
In the end, Statham confronts the villain on his yacht. I can’t say it’s great, but it yields a couple of nifty action moments. Statham uses a guy as a human shield, tosses another into a hot tub and gives him a hand grenade as a personal floatation device, and duels with the anchor-wielding villain.
The first Mechanic (OK, the Mechanic remake, if you want to get technical, since Charles Bronson was in the original) wasn’t exactly memorable, but it was an entertaining Jason Statham vehicle. This one is a step down, but not by much. It’s far from his worst; it’s just that it never quite gets into a rhythm. It sometimes flirts with the outrageousness of a Transporter movie and then pulls back almost immediately into a blander, more generic type of actioner. I have a feeling that if the filmmakers fully embraced the goofiness and really went for broke (i.e. doubled-down on shark repellent); it might’ve been a classic.