If you’re a Jason Statham fan, you might like this movie.

Then again, you might not.

MECHANIC:  RESURRECTION (2016) is a sequel to THE MECHANIC (2011), a halfway decent action movie which starred Jason Statham and Ben Foster.  Statham is back for the sequel, while Foster is not.

Let’s not mince words:  MECHANIC: RESURRECTION is a terrible movie.

It has little to offer other than some picturesque location photography and the obligatory Jason Statham fight scenes.  That’s really what this sequel is all about.  It’s just an excuse to film Statham beating on bad guys.  The most frustrating part of the whole thing is you don’t have to be Shakespeare to come up with a decent action movie plot.  The story to this one is lame and laughable .

Unstoppable assassin Arthur Bishop (Jason Statham) is living the good life.  He’s hiding out in Rio de Janeiro, and life is good, mostly because he’s “retired” since everyone believes he’s dead.  When the movie opens, his free ride comes to a close when a woman approaches him with a job, and she tells Bishop that if he declines her boss’ offer, that they will broadcast to the world that he is still alive.  I guess she hasn’t seen too many Jason Statham movies.  You should never threaten the guy.

Bishop goes ballistic, and in one of the film’s better action sequences— not a good sign when the film’s best action sequence occurs before the opening credits— singlehandedly wipes out about 30 henchmen, in a rather cool scene which culminates on top of a frighteningly high cable car.  This opening scene is very James Bond like.  So the film gets off to a strong start.  But it’s all downhill from there.

Bishop learns that the man who wants to hire him is his former friend Crain (Sam Hazeldine) who now happens to be his mortal enemy.  I guess they stopped sending each other Christmas cards.  When Crain’s next contact comes along, a woman named Gina (Jessica Alba), Bishop turns the tables on her and forces her to tell him her story, a sob story that is about as believable a plot in a bad Lifetime movie.  It turns out Gina works with underpriviliged children, and Crain threatened to kill the kids.  Jeesh!  You can’t get much lower than that.  Where’s Crain’s black hat and mustache?

Bishop promises to bring Gina to safety and stresses that he will never work for Crain, but in the very next scene, Crain’s men overpower Bishop and abduct Gina, and the next thing we know, Bishop is working for Crain.  Of course, he’s doing it to protect Gina’s life.  What a guy!

Crain wants Bishop to kill three men, and every time Bishop succeeds, Crain promises to let Bishop speak with Gina so he’ll know that she is still alive.  Bishop’s special talent is that he makes his hits look like accidents, and so he goes about killing these targets—who are supposedly protected by the best security on the planet— while making their deaths look like accidents.

When Bishop gets to the third man, Max Adams (Tommy Lee Jones) he decides to offer him a deal in order to turn the tables on Crain, seemingly for no other reason than the guy is being played by Tommy Lee Jones.  Bishop’s plan would have worked just as easily with Adams dead.

The plot to MECHANIC: RESURRECTION nearly put me to sleep.  It was farfetched and convoluted  throughout.

While I remain a Jason Statham fan, mostly because he looks the parts he plays and is believable as an unstoppable assassin, MECHANIC:  RESURRECTION is one of the weaker films I’ve seen him in.

Jessica Alba, who I usually like a lot, wasn’t convincing here at all. I never believed Gina was a real person.  It’s probably the weakest Alba performance I’ve seen yet.

Likewise, Sam Hazeldine as Crain made for a pretty boring villain.  It didn’t help that every time he opened his mouth a cliche came out.

And Tommy Lee Jones looked like he was having a blast during his one hour shoot.  Yup, it looks like Jones strolled onto the set for about an hour, delivered his lines, and left.  He has very little impact on this movie.

The worst part of MECHANIC:  RESURRECTION is the writing.  The screenplay by Philip Shelby and Tony Mosher tells a simpleminded story that is as dull as it is unimaginative.  It also contains cliche-ridden dialogue throughout.

Director Dennis Gansel fares slightly better.  The pre-credit sequence is a good one, and there’s lots of picturesque photography of several exotic settings, including Rio and Thailand.  But the bulk of the action scenes don’t hold up, and Bishop’s “accidental” murders aren’t as creative as the ones in the first movie.

The first movie THE MECHANIC (2011) was also a better movie because it had strong source material, as it was a remake of a 1972 Charles Bronson movie of the same name.

This sequel MECHANIC:  RESURRECTION is as lame as can be.  It’s for hardcore Jason Statham fans only.  Then again, I’m a big Jason Stathan fan myself, and I didn’t like this one at all.

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