MOVIE REVIEW - The Mechanic

Action star Jason Stratham is back in another shoot-em-up modern day action flick, The Mechanic.

In this movie the term "mechanic" is referring to a hit man. Stratham plays Bishop, who secretly woks for a company that pays him big dollars to kill various types of people that the company's clients request and pay for. He does it with skill and precision, and usually very discreetly. After power struggle within the top level of his employer, he is forced to kill his mentor and boss. Afterwards feeling remorse, he takes in his dead bosses young adult son, who wants to get into the killing business too, (for some reason, never completely made clear.)

Doesn't all this sound so lovely? Well that's a Stratham movie. He generally plays the same kind of character. The lone wolf, never smiling, always glum, trained killer of some kind. And for him this is working. He always seems to find an audience and a following. This of course is nothing new, Jean Claude Van Damme, and Steven Seagal before him, Sly Stallone too. Lots of creative, and not so creative ways to kill people and tons of things blowing up, and even more gratuitous violence. That's just the formula that has worked for years, and will work long after Stratham ages out, and someone else takes his place.

This is not a bad movie. It's not a good movie. It's just a movie.....and for me that's the sign of the fact that I may have just wasted my time, and you may feel that way too. Granted, Stratham is who he is, and you're not expecting miracles here, but I think you are entitled to see something new, something exciting, and maybe something you have not seen before a hundred times. At the very least a signature scene that you can take with you to work and talk to your buddies about. But nothing new happens here at all. It's a video game come to life.

The Mechanic. Not bad, not good, not anything. For an action based, blow-em-up movie it just kind of lays there. Netflix in 90 days at best.