As played by Jason Statham, master assassin Arthur Bishop returns from 2011’s The Mechanic, but loses his “The” along the way to Mechanic: Resurrection. It’s a sequel for which no one was clamoring, given the tepid response to the 2011 film, itself a remake of the 1972 Charles Bronson vehicle.
Presumed dead and definitely retired, Bishop lives quietly and off the radar … until he’s tracked down and approached to perform three hits for a man named Crain (Sam Hazeldine, 2012’s The Raven). Bishop refuses … until Crain’s goons kidnap Bishop’s brand-new girlfriend, Gina (Jessica Alba, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For), and hold her as incentive. This works, even though Bishop literally just met her the day before, but hey, Gina’s a social-justice peacenik who runs a shelter in Cambodia for victims of human trafficking — in other words, she’s a keeper!
Bishop’s hit list, in order of preferred execution:
1. an Idi Amin-style warlord (Femi Elufowoju Jr., The Legend of 1900) holed up in an impenetrable Malaysian prison.
2. a billionaire (newcomer Toby Eddington) holed up in an impenetrable Australian high-rise.
3. an arms dealer (Jason Bourne’s Tommy Lee Jones, whose craggy face sports a stoopid goatee) holed up in an impenetrable Bulgarian fortress.
Employing disguises and MacGyver-ing the shit out of situations on the fly, Bishop is one smooth operator, reminding viewers of one Ethan Hunt, debonair agent extraordinaire for the Impossible Missions Force. In a likely not-accidental move on the part of director Dennis Gansel (We Are the Night), this Resurrection wants to reinvent itself as a Mission: Impossible holdover. In fact, Resurrection’s most memorable set piece — in which Bishop cracks open the glass bottom of a cantilever pool 76 floors above ground — directly recalls Tom Cruise’s skyscraper-crawling exploits in Ghost Protocol. (Not for nothing was this scene the centerpiece of the studio’s ad campaign.)
This movie, however, is a below-average ass-kicker whose three-kill structure feels like episodes of an as-yet-nonexistent Mechanic TV series slapped together to sell as a feature overseas. With the teacher/student relationship that drove The Mechanic’s plot machinations now gone (along with Statham’s co-star, Ben Foster, Hell or High Water), so has the one thing that made that movie stand out from the action pack. Statham (Furious 7) is not to blame; as always, he delivers, which is immediately obvious in the slam-bang prologue, an asinine yet irresistible melding of Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest and the goofy stunts of the 007 adventure Moonraker. What Alba is doing in such a small, thankless and insignificant part is anyone’s guess, so I’ll take one: to allow Gansel’s camera to admire her supple, cocoa-butter flesh? Yeah, it’s a gimme. —Rod Lott