The Mechanic: Trying to make a decent contract killer out of a punk-ass loose canon

The Mechanic distinguishes itself almost instantly from your run-of-the-mill contemporary hitman-as-antihero actioner by way of its relative efficiency, dearth of annoying cutting frenzies and absence of ostentatious computer-enhanced tomfoolery. Most pleasingly, it also sports a far more interesting soundtrack than is the norm for a Jason Statham vehicle. Statham’s stoic killer, one Arthur Bishop, digs Schubert and high-end hi-fi, lives in quiet seclusion in the everglades, and is considering purchasing a nice little yacht.

After he’s paid to bump off Harry, his aged mentor—a pleasing cameo from Donald Sutherland in a wheelchair—he attempts penance via playing surrogate big brother and all-round Mister Miyagi to Steve, Sutherland’s ne’er-do-well brute of a son, played with remarkable nuance by Ben Foster, who exercised somewhat similar neuroses as the troubled Iraq vet in last year’s intelligent war-at-home drama The Messenger. But Steve’s something of a sadomasochist. He gets his kicks from dirty fights and punk-ass recklessness, the antithesis of Bishop’s “Make it clean” mantra. So when Bishop starts subcontracting jobs to the kid of course everything rapidly goes to hell. Meanwhile Steve, ignorant as to who killed dad, starts to wonder why Bishop’s being so nice to him all of a sudden.

Statham’s so rarely used to full effect. It’s refreshing to see him in a picture devoid of splatter, misogyny, sexual assault, inane video game aping, and bad comedy. But this remake of the 1972 film of the same name, which starred Charles Bronson, whose career certainly had its limits but could still serve as an instructive model for the Statham, rarely rises above being a classyish regurgitation of well-worn macho clichés, replete with a gold-hearted hooker who serves virtually no purpose. All of which is fine, of course, which is to say easy enough watch flicker across a screen for 92 minutes. The mostly straightforward direction comes from Simon West, who incidentally hasn’t helmed a feature since Tomb Raider. His handling of a sequence in which a romantic evening out with two tough guys turns into a monster truck rally for humans is bracing enough. The script was co-written by Lewis John Carlino, who wrote the original, but it feels less updated than resuscitated. It does have one great line: “I’m going to a put a price on your head so high,” Tony Goldwyn’s baddie tells Statham, “every time you look in the mirror you’re going to want to shoot yourself in the face.” I’m glad Statham doesn’t actually shoot his own face, but I kinda wish he’d sever ties with his agent.

Charlie don't slurp

The Expendables: Island hosts a cage match

Sylvester Stallone’s throwback actioner gathers as many genre stars as can fit on the poster and casts them as soldiers of fortune who take out baddies on a made-up Latin American isle where ugly American Eric Roberts has erected a puppet dictator in the interests of squeezing as much dope from cheap labour as possible. Somewhere in all this the mercenaries talk about feelings and ostensibly gain some social conscience. Obviously, the whole thing’s absurd and wildly bloodthirsty. Amongst the more astonishing sequences has Stallone and Jason Statham just barely escape from the island only to double back for no other reason than to slaughter dozens of underpaid local military. Yes, these are the good guys. And if their journey gradually bears vague traces of a Wild Bunch type of suicidal, go-for-broke, final act shoot-up, you can rest assured that the list of casualties will manage to stay extremely one-sided.

The Expendables is not without bizarre points of interest. Plenty of shit blows up for those requiring that sort of thing, but merely beholding this motley assemblage of hulks, he-men and has-beens can be kind of fascinating in its own right. Mickey Rourke especially seems present for no other reason than to present Mickey Rourke. He enters on a Harley, sports his favoured Predator hairdo, does tattoos, smokes a pipe, and gets a teary monologue soaked in regret and despair—is it me or did Rourke invent this character on his own? Jet Li is the butt of many short jokes and that’s about it. Dolph Lundgren gets the nuttiest bit as the loose cannon who turns on his own crew, with lines like “Life’s a joke, shitbird!” and “Bring it, Happy Feet!” (That one’s for Li.) Stallone for his part underplays every scene, his face clay-like and largely immobile, his bulging veins resembling a topographical map of the Himalayas, which might be the place on earth where The Expendables isn’t opening this weekend. It’ll be bigger than Westlemania.

See Wednesday's post for a wide-ranging rooftop interview with Dolph Lundgren

Assault and batteries: Crank: High Voltage

Having been mortally poisoned at the start of Crank, which ends with his falling from a helicopter and landing with a cartoon splat on the asphalt, we could be forgiven for assuming we’d seen the last of Chev Chelios, the indefatigable adrenaline junky and hired killer played by Jason Statham. Yet, taking implausibility and audacity as its chief criteria, Crank: High Voltage elevates Chelios from mere super-sadist to something virtually indestructible, the Terminator with a hard-on, an electric Lazarus raised from the dead to wreak havoc upon Los Angeles once more.

Chelios wakes to find himself in some seedy Oriental massage parlour. He’s had his heart ripped out and replaced with an electrical one, so, after squeezing some information from a fat thug who’s gaping anus he shoves a tar-smeared rifle into, Chelios steals a car and begins the hunt the baddies in possession of his second-most vital organ for what nefarious purposes we can only imagine. But Chelios needs fuel to stay alive, so he must regularly recharge via booster cables, Tasers, defibrillators and transformers, his hunger for juice providing ample opportunities for creative hedonism, including feats of imagination such as sexually assaulting an elderly woman to generate a little body contract friction.

More of a remake than a sequel, Crank: High Voltage essentially revisits the same territory of its predecessor but with even greater absurdity and even less focus. There is the revenge narrative that takes us on a colourful tour of the LA scumbag underground. There’s a reunion with Chelios’ beloved Eve (Amy Smart), who’s apparently become a stripper in the three months since Chelios’ ostensible death and is thus able to pass some action sequences wearing only pink hotpants and duct tape on her titties, and there is another scene of them having public sex, though this time not initiated as an act of rape. There is the open hostility to minorities, homosexuals, women and the sex trade, not to mention EMS workers and gentle gardeners. Yet because Crank: High Voltage has moved into the realm of full-on bananas, its crudity and misanthropic aggression to all beings below Statham on the food chain is somewhat tempered by pure silliness, for better or for worse.

Returning writer/directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor still can’t seem to make a movie so much as a fidgety mash-up, heavily dependent on freak-out guest appearances, spastic editing, a strained, self-conscious grindhouse aesthetic and the dumb, fleeting rush of video game nihilism. But there are vaguely inspired and entertaining bits, including an unexpected homagette to Belle de jour and a picket line of porn stars protesting low wages—surely the most implausible episode in a movie driven by implausibles. “Do you want me to fuck this car?” one of these impoverished performers asks. It is arguably a sign of the filmmakers’ subtly discriminate taste that amidst such mayhem such a potentially spectacular feat of autoeroticism fails to occur.

Transporter 3: On the road again, going nowhere

Frank Martin (Jason Statham) is still transporting. I do not mean that in any figurative sense. Of course he’d just as soon be fishing or dozing to big screen golf in his luxury hideaway, but his reputation as a kung fu-fighting super-smuggler is just too great to leave him in peace. Toxic waste-managing scumbags fronted by an American with bad facial hair and fathomless resources (Robert Knepper, suitably sub-James Woodsish) kidnap Frank and force him to transport once again. Frank’s adorned with a big metal bracelet—should he stray more than a short distance away from his car, the bracelet will blow him to bits. His cargo is the freckly sex kitten daughter of the Ukrainian prime minister (Natalya Rudakova). She’s got a bracelet, too, which is to say their accessories match. She digs it when he kicks ass. He likes her knowledge of Euro-cuisine. Three guesses what’ll transpire between our rugged hero and this pouty party girl.

The Transporter movies are scripted by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen. Besson’s the workaholic producer/writer/director with the pom-pom hair, famous for La Femme Nikita, The Professional and The Fifth Element. Kamen wrote The Karate Kid. We can be grateful they inject the franchise with some entertainment value if nothing else. The plot mechanics of Transporter 3 are invariably inane. A car crashes through Frank’s wall; medics arrive, usher the bloodied driver into the ambulance and speed way without ever noticing the passenger spread out in the backseat. Frank escapes a watery grave by inflating some plastic bags with air from the car’s tires; when he and the car safely re-emerge in their makeshift dingy, lo and behold, the tires are full once more and the car ready for action. No one’s fooling anybody here. The dumbness is almost a selling point.

If only the suspiciously monikered Olivier Megaton could direct Transporter 3 with efficiency, or something like competence. He composes the simplest scenes from 25 shots when maybe three would serve. The movie’s a visual mess and, unlikely as it sounds, even confusing. It doesn’t help that Rudakova’s innocent is mostly just annoying. Or that the fight scenes shamelessly recycle ideas from the previous Transporters. But we always have Statham, that great underachiever of contemporary movies. Granted, the guy must incredibly work hard to be able to do all those martial arty sequences, using his jacket, shirt and tie as grappling tools so as to make the fights a sort of slapstick striptease. But has no one taken this perfectly charming, clearly talented, ruggedly handsome and unusual actor and offered to find him a new agent? Has no smart casting director, producer or director caught on the fact that Statham is ripe for something more interesting? Or is Statham just waiting to get through War 4, Transporter 9 or The Albanian Job before he accepts that he could be so much more than the next Dolph Lundgren?