The Mechanic’s Gun Love

Remember all that talk (for about five minutes) post-Tucson shooting that maybe Hollywood movies project an image of violence too readily to young men? The conversation was even more halfhearted than the gun control debate where people mentioned it might be okay if people aren’t allowed to buy assault weapons, and then dropped it by the time the NFL playoffs were concluded.

When I was in high school, Columbine and a string of school shootings made everything BUT lack of gun control a possible explanation, from not having prayer in schools to abstinence only education (let’s be honest, nobody ever saw a kid who’s getting some go on a shooting rampage). It wasn’t that easy access to semi automatic rifles for 15 year olds was the root problem. It was because “Hollyweird” made The Matrix and kids in the suburbs just can’t handle that without picking up a gun and killing someone. Of course, a hundred million people saw The Matrix and played doom and somehow managed not to turn into nazi-admiring scuzz ball assholes (an ideology completely at odds with The Matrix’s call to freedom), but never mind. Hollywood was a convenient scapegoat that let high schools off the hook for not policing bullying and gun manufacturers skate on lax—i.e. no—background checks.

Now we have The Mechanic, a movie that celebrates guns, explosions, revenge, hit men, inventive ways to kill people, slow motion explosions, bigger guns, sports cars, has no female character that isn’t a prostitute, a ridiculous car chase where the police somehow don’t show up, and a really big explosion. “Fuck yeah!” the movie seems to say about mindless violence, stopping just short of having Jason Statham’s character have sex with a gun.

What Works: Not a whole lot, but Donald Sutherland has a few soulful moments towards the beginning that make you wish he was getting some of the token old man roles going to Anthony Hopkins. Aside from that…well…uhhh…there’s a gratuitous sex scene that nicely broke up the gratuitous action scenes.

What Doesn’t: This movie goes through every Jason Statham movie cliché in the book without asking us to care about a single character because they’re either bad guys or worse guys. It also repeats the hit man movie cliché of everyone Statham’s character is asked to kill being a bad guy, that way we don’t notice we’re watching a cold blooded killer offing people in sometimes disgusting ways. I felt bad for some of the victims and the action scenes are so farfetched I hated them. Plus, Ben Foster’s hitman-in-training is as weird and unlikable as all his other performances. Can this guy have a single human interaction in any movie he plays?

What I Would Have Done Differently: It’s hard to think of a way to make a hit man movie feel fresh because it’s been done to death. I would probably prefer a very realistic approach and actually cover the business of contract killing (or “private security” firms as it’s known in real life) as Michael Mann covered high end bank robbery in his landmark movie Heat.