Proving that remakes are often most justified when working from crummy source material, The Mechanic updates a 1972 Charles Bronson snoozer with enough style and ultra-violence to mark it as an adequate addition to the B-movie canon of Jason Statham. Borrowing the basic template of Michael Winner’s original but, mercifully, not its slothful pacing, pitifully conceived set pieces, and wannabe-Jean-Pierre Melville atmosphere of brooding crime-pic existentialism, Simon West’s film concerns Arthur Bishop (Statham), a “mechanic” (a.k.a. hitman) whose precision workmanship is put to use by a shadowy corporate organization run by Dean (Tony Goldwyn), who employs Bishop for hush-hush jobs offing a variety of stock baddies, including a Colombian cartel bigwig, a gargantuan assassin, and a murderous, borderline-pedophilic religious cult leader.
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