First a Transporter, Now a Mechanic

When I first saw the trailer for The Mechanic, the first thing that came to mind was, "great, another Transporter movie." Accordingly, I went into the theaters expecting to see another mindless action film with lots of explosion, forgettable storyline, and extremely corny dialogue.

I was actually in for quite a pleasant surprise.

Don't get me wrong, the movie is mainly an action flick, and its story does fall into the predictable category. In fact, I'll break it down right now:

1. There's this guy Arthur Bishop (not that his name matters), who's really good at killing people. I mean, not just good. REALLY GOOD. To emphanize, the movie starts off with Bishop smoothly taking out a leader of a drug cartel.
2. This guy is forced by the people he work for to do something he doesn't want to do. But being a professional killer, he still begrudgingly does it anyway.
3. He finds out he was betrayed by the people he worked for, gets pissed, and kills everyone. How can he do this? Because, as we saw before, he is the best. They got other professionals to kill him? Doesn't matter, he's just the best, so he never gets caught by surprise, and the most injury he sustains fighting the second best is a punch in the face (by this time, you're supposed to go "WOAH, HE IS GOOOOOOD", in bold, capital letters, with special emphasis on the word good).

So what makes me like this movie much better than the Transporter trilogy? For one, the dialogues in this movie are actually fairly good, for an action movie, that is. The movie spends a good amount of time in the first 30 mins or so on developing the relationship between Bishop and his new apprentice. For another, the ending was, dare I say, quite unexpected. I did see the general picture coming, but the details were different enough to make me sit up on my seat and go "wow...." when it happened.

Overall, I have to say I enjoyed the movie, though most if it was probably due to my low expectations. But if you're into action flicks, and you got some time to kill, watching this movie is not a bad idea. That is, provided you've seen all the better ones, such as Taken and Casino Royale (I won't even bring Batman Begins and Dark Knight into this, those movies are just on a much higher level). That's just my way of cautiously recommending this movie.