the mechanic

I've generally enjoyed most of the Jason Statham films I've seen.

They're not generally anything more than fairly basic action films, with Statham kicking ass and taking names.  He's generally very good at the action stuff and they excel in the fighting and violence, rather than plot.

I have to say, though, that I found the mechanic to be quite poor.

Apparently it's a remake of a Michael Winner film, but I've never seen that so I can't really comment on that side of it.  What I would say is that the problem really is the main character, played by Statham.

See, he's not very likeable, which is okay, but he's also most definitely not a proper anti-hero.  I mean, his "job" is as an assassin, so he kills people, and it's sort of hinted that he only kills bad people, but this is never clearly stated.  So he's a killer, but a killer of bad people.

So that makes him a "good guy", except he's not that either.  Being an assassin it's fairly obvious that the plot involves him being used to kill somebody that he shouldn't have or that didn't need to die (it's a wonder assassins don't see this coming).  But this really cuts to the heart of the problem.

He's supposed to be this super-efficient, sees everything coming guy, but he just takes the assassination contracts at face value.  It's horribly contradictory.

He also weirdly ends up taking an apprentice out of... well, I'm not sure, guilt?  It's not entirely clear - the apprentice didn't really want to become an assassin, he just sort of goes along with it.

It's all very random.

But what makes it worse is that where the poor plot would usually be compensated for by lots of action and fight scenes, the film doesn't really have that many.  And Statham is only in a handful of them.  Also, they're not particularly interesting - either super-efficient, bang you're dead, or horribly messy.

It was all very disappointing.