Jason Statham plays The Mechanic, an elite hitman employed by a shadowy front that pays him a lot of money for being the perfect assassination machine. But when a squad of his colleagues is gunned down by someone inside the agency, The Statham has to take out the man responsible -- his wheelchair-bound mentor, played by Donald Sutherland. (The wheelchair thing serves no purpose other than to facilitate a scene in which Sutherland shows off his freakishly impressive upper body strength by shimmying down some stairs while sitting on wheels. Not bad for a 75-year-old, even if it was wholly pointless.) Sutherland-on-Wheels' death greatly disturbs his already disturbed son (Ben Foster) who decides he'd like to go on a killing spree, and that his father's protégé The Statham is the one to teach him how to become a Mechanic. Gee, you don't suppose the kid might find out who really killed his father, do you? That sure would be awkward!

What follows is a clichéd training montage -- one that seems kind of unnecessary, considering how innately badass Foster's character already is -- and a bunch of plot twists and growing pains we're all familiar with. Foster goes out on his first job and nearly botches it because of his overreaching inexperience. Eventually he gets better, and they learn to trust each other, which is of course exactly when Foster figures out who killed his father. Oh, and about that? It turns out that Sutherland was set up by the agency, and that the guy The Statham knew from the slain squad is still alive and the one behind it all, a twist even the 12-year-old boys sitting in front of me saw coming. Then Foster and The Mechanic kill everyone involved in the frame job, but sort of boringly, to be honest, because apparently director Simon West put all his energy into crafting off-putting extreme close-ups during expository dialogue scenes and had little left over for crafting thrilling action. SUVs were driving through exploding buses, for crissakes, and I was stifling yawns. That hurts, coming from the man who made Con Air. It was like he only did this for the paycheck. (He definitely only did this for the paycheck.)

So yeah, not The Statham's best work. Or Ben Foster's, for that matter, who is actually a really great actor. Why does he not get better movies? Why can't I have my 13 bucks back? Why was there not a gun made up of other guns in this movie like I was promised? This is the kind of disillusionment that can only be righted by a Crank double feature.

See what Mechanic co-star Ben Foster had to say about gun porn in this interview.

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