Mechanic: Resurrection

I’m sure he’s a professional, but I wonder sometimes when Jason Statham wakes up in the morning, before he goes to work, if he may lie in bed wondering: Am I a driver-for-hire who transports dangerous things for money? Am I an assassin who was poisoned with some drug that will kill me if my heart rate goes below a certain point? Am I a mercenary surrounded by a bunch of washed-up middle-aged actors looking to cash in on some Eighties nostalgia? Or am I yet another assassin who gets the big bucks for making each death look like an accident?

If you can name those movies, well, more power to you: You have won the Jason Statham Trivia Challenge. And while a typical Statham movie is becoming an increasingly watered-down affair, you won’t find a film more diluted than Mechanic: Resurrection (that would be the last scenario in the above paragraph). Hiding out in Rio after the events of the last film (don’t bother), our hero Arthur Bishop gets tracked down by bad guy Crain (Hazeldine), who forces him to kill three other bad guys, or else he’ll kill Bishop’s I-just-met-her-and-really-she’s-just-a-plant-but-I-care-about-her-anyway girlfriend Gina (Alba, who was basically paid to be thrown around and shot). Bishop reluctantly agrees, and so let’s hop around to Thailand, Australia, Bulgaria, and wait: Hold up, is that Tommy Lee Jones with a soul patch and rose-colored sunglasses looking like an ancient ex-member of Aerosmith? Why yes, yes it is. A poor man’s Mission: Impossible (which I guess makes it MacGyver by default?), Mechanic: Resurrection is a flat and tedious action film that elicited the most lethal response possible when I asked my movie date what she thought after the credits rolled: “boring.” Agreed.