The opening credits weren’t encouraging. Jason Statham! Jessica Alba! Michelle Yeoh! Tommy Lee Jones! Well, if this is 2005, you might just have a blockbuster on your hands. But this isn’t 2005, and Jessica Alba ain’t exactly Meryl Streep. One has to love the Hollywood logic, btw, stating that Alba (35) is a much more suitable love interest –rats! Promised I wouldn’t use the word “interest.” Hmmmm, Ok, how about “more ideally suited figure to share naughty time” with Statham (49) over Yeoh (54). Yes, I’m confirming now this very flawed film isn’t going to win any awards, but it could have been sooooo much worse.
Mechanic: Resurrection is a bit of a travelogue. Bulgaria, Sydney, Thailand, Malaysia … it’s like watching a condensed season of “The Amazing Race.” The action begins in Rio, which was cool, ‘cuz I missed most of the summer Olympics. Thanks to team Statham, I got a good view of Christ the Redeemer, the Sugarloaf teleférico and the Olympic skydiving competition. The “Resurrection” part is that our hero plays a chameleon-like fixer who faked his own death years ago. When discovered, he wisely beats up a tourist café and dives from the top of an aerial cable car onto a moving hang glider. There are entire Bond films without a stunt this good.
Of course, then the plot gets in the way, darn it. Megalomaniacal movie villain Crain (Sam Hazeldine) wants former grade school chum Bishop (Statham) to kill three guys or else … evil. It’s ok; the guys are all bad. To insure the execution, he threatens Bishop’s new “friend” Gina (Alba) and her Thai students. I 
can’t decide which part of this I found more tiresome – the idiotic leverage (this is like robbing a bank with a phone), how easily trackable free agent Bishop is – he went from Rio to those mushroom islands off Thailand and the antagonist found him before he got over jet lag– or the fact that Statham sees the set-up well ahead of time and lets it happen anyway. You ask me? I think this guy is a true fixer; I think he likes killing people, even if being used pisses him off.
I’m thinking “Mechanic” is more of an honorary title. While “Bishop” or whatever he calls himself today is certainly a MacGyver-like engineer, he’s not really a mechanic, dig? Doesn’t matter; the settings and action are worth the time investment even if the plot and romance are not.
Pronouncements of doom were in haste
The truth about Statham, embraced
If this cat’s dead
What’s left instead
Is a different two-hour waste
Rated R, 99 Minutes
D: Dennis Gansel
W: Philip Shelby and Tony Mosher
Genre: Statham annoys people
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Action junkies
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: Plot junkies
