Killings abundant in movie ‘The Mechanic’

Garbage trucks and disposals in film sicken student

By Jessica Pickens

pickensj@mytjnow.com

“The Mechanic” isn’t about a guy who fixes cars. 

Apparently, a mechanic is who gets paid to kill people, but I’m so naïve I assumed it was someone who uses a wrench and changes oil. 

I’m generally not in the market for this type of movie. 

I like clean, classic films with some romance, a few laughs and a lot of glamour.   But friends convinced me to go, so I joined.

Jason Statham plays Arthur Bishop. He likes classical music, classic Jaguars and blues clubs in New Orleans. 

He also enjoys killing people. 

Bishop is a hired mechanic who is paid to kill political figures, drug lords and arms smugglers. 

The catch is all the killings have to be clean. 

For example, Bishop kills a man and makes it look like he hanged himself while watching erotic porn. 

I don’t enjoy excessive blood and violence in movies, so the clean killings were easier for me to stomach. 

 I sat back and enjoyed the movie, thinking I wouldn’t see any blood splatter.

But I was wrong.

Enter Bishop’s new killing apprentice, Steve McKenna, played by Ben Foster. 

McKenna is the son of iconic mechanic Harry McKenna, played by Donald Sutherland, who is killed.

After the apprentice joins the killing spree, the rest of the movie is anything but clean. 

McKenna gets a big ego and wants to be as smooth as Bishop. He fails miserably as he trashes another assassin’s house in the attempt to kill him. 

Blood is flying everywhere as McKenna bashes the 300-pound assassin in the neck with a coal shovel. Needless to say, my eyes were closed.

Other fantastic killings occurred, such as a fight on an airport shuttle bus involving a guy getting hit by an oncoming car and a 15 car pileup in the middle of the city.  

One wonders, where are the police during all of this? 

The movie also contained two of my greatest fears: a hand getting caught in the blades of a running garbage disposal and people being impaled by a garbage truck. 

The movie was generally good, but I wasn’t crazy about it.  

I know Statham was supposed to be tough and stoic, but he also didn’t have any emotion or feeling.

The ending was a bit silly, far-fetched and not the way I wanted it to end.  This is a remake of a 1972 movie of the same title starring Charles Bronson. 

I haven’t seen it, but from what I’ve heard it ends the way I thought it should.