Mechanic: Resurrection (2016)

The sequel to a remake of a 1972 film arrives with modest ambitions and meets every one of them. Jason Statham glides through Rio, Bangkok, Sydney, and Varna, staging three assassinations that must resemble accidents, and the camera regards each death with the calm of a man reading a train timetable. The plot exists to move him between continents. The dialogue exists to fill the silence between explosions. This is craftsmanship of a narrow kind, and it is not without a certain grim competence.

On the matter of casting, the film assembles a genuinely international roster: Jessica Alba, Michelle Yeoh, Femi Elufowoju Jr., Rhatha Phongam. The globe-trotting premise puts them to work in Bangkok, Phnom Penh, Kuala Lumpur, and the Bulgarian mountains, and the result is a polyglot ensemble that never once remarks upon itself. Alba's Gina runs a Cambodian children's shelter, a detail of some moral weight, but she spends most of the running time bound, gagged, or displayed on a video call as leverage. Yeoh's Mei is capable and loyal and largely waits at the resort. The film has no argument to make about any of this. It needed bodies in interesting locations, and it found them.

The villains are a warlord, a Sydney billionaire and former human trafficker, and an American arms dealer. A more excitable production might have found something to say about the men who profit from human misery. This one regards them as obstacles requiring chemistry, architecture, and a tube of something corrosive. The film preaches nothing, argues nothing, and asks nothing of its audience beyond attention during the set pieces. It is a machine for delivering a man falling seventy-six stories into a swimming pool far below, and on that narrow contract it delivers. We are left with the sobering realization that some films are simply about a man who kills people for money, and that this one is entirely content to be that.