Review: Don’t waste your money by watching truly awful ‘Mechanic: Resurrection’

Posted on September 2, 2016

By MARK VIOLA

Last week in my review of “Ben-Hur,” I railed against remakes. Nothing new. This week, “Mechanic: Resurrection,” the sequel to 2011’s Jason Statham-starring “The Mechanic,” which itself was a remake by the way, really wants me to rail against sequels.

But even if “Mechanic: Resurrection” wasn’t a sequel, it would still be a total and complete mess. The script makes no sense. I know I probably say that too often, but in this case, I’m not sure if a single plot development or character decision makes any sense whatsoever. And speaking of the characters, they are as flat as paper. The acting is passable at best and that’s being kind (the only time I will be kind in this review, to be sure). But topping it off, this movie just looks bad. It’s honestly one of the worst produced films I’ve seen this year.

I usually try to give the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt. Even if it’s their first movie, that’s more filmmaking that I’ve ever done. Credit to them. But in this movie, there are so many things which make me think they didn’t really care about the quality of the final product, and worse still, didn’t care that we could see they didn’t care.

As for the story, the previous film ended with Arthur Bishop (Statham)–a hitman who specializes in making his kills look like accidents–faking his own death. It’s been a few years since then and Arthur is enjoying being dead, leaving the killing game behind him, until one day when he is confronted by a group of goons working for an arms dealer named Crain (Sam Hazeldine, “Peaky Blinders”) who wants him to take out three specific people. The jobs are practically impossible and require someone with the skills Arthur possesses.

Unfortunately for Crain, Arthur has no interest in taking the job, so the arms dealer will have to force his hand, using leverage in the form of a woman named Gina (Jessica Alba, “Sin City: A Dame to Kill For”), whom he kidnaps and takes hostage. Thus, Arthur will have to take on the jobs and complete the impossible.

And there’s your movie, and believe me, my summary makes it sound a lot better than it is. None of it makes sense if you spend even a few seconds thinking about it. I do know some people who will go into this movie and because there are a lot of gunfights and explosions, they’ll get some superficial enjoyment out of the experience. More power to them. I’m still not going to recommend anyone actually spend money to see this. If you want to wait until it’s on TV and get some “it’s so bad, it’s funny” enjoyment out of it, go right ahead. Just don’t waste your money on this movie. It’s simply bad, on just about every level a movie can be bad.

Take the production. (Please!) There is a ton of green screen used in this movie. And in almost every case, it’s painfully obvious that the actors are standing in front of a green screen with the background added in later. But it gets worse than that. There is a moment near the end when Arthur is fighting on a yacht, dispatching henchmen left and right. There is a railing behind him that is real, but the water and sky behind it is not. And the green screen work is so bad, they apparently tried to touch it up by blurring the edges of his head. Never seen that before in my life. Hope I never do again. Let it sink in that someone had to sign off on that work and say, “Yep, that’s good enough.”

There are also numerous times when a scene will flip back and forth from pitch black to merely dusk as it switches from one camera angle to the next, because the close-ups were obviously filmed at a different time than the wider shots and, once again, nobody bothered to fix it.

If you want to see a decent film about a hitman, skip going to the movies and rent “Mr. Right,” a comedic action movie starring Anna Kendrick and Sam Rockwell. You can get it on Amazon for $3.99. Stay at home, toss some popcorn in the microwave and save yourself some money. Even if you don’t like it, I’m betting you’ll have a better time than if you went to see “Mechanic: Resurrection.”

The movie is rated R for violence throughout and language.

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