The Mechanic (1972) versus The Mechanic (2011) and the Flattening of our Popular Culture

The Mechanic (1972) is one of my all-time favorite thrillers. It has an enormous amount of depth to it that stays with you in a way that todays treatment of the thriller genre doesn’t.  I count it among those paragons of the seventies’ crime genre, like The Godfather films, The Conversation and The French Connection (1973) and of course Bronson’s other groundbreaking film of the early seventies, Deathwish (1974). All of those films, despite the violence that came to personify them, are literate in a way that their counterparts in this era simply are not.

That sad comparison becomes even more apparent when a remake appears that doesn’t really measure up. I’m talking of course about The Mechanic (2011) with Jason Statham. Take the central character of Arthur Bishop. In the remake, he’s a bit of a cipher. He lives alone in the Louisiana bayous in hidden splendor, where he listens to classical music on an immaculate, old school record player that no one is allowed to touch but him. For recreation, there’s a beautiful call girl that he pays well, and the renovation of a classic sports car that he’s been working on for two years. It’s the fantasy of every adolescent (and possibly middle-aged) male on earth. It’s alluring, this seeming luxury and privilege of a life without commitment but fails to demonstrate the costs that such an existence would exact on the man who’s chosen to live it. 

The Arthur Bishop of the original film however, Bronson’s Bishop, is all costs. The isolated splendor is there, but it comes with a huge emotional toll. He takes what appears to be antidepressants to help him cope with being unable to establish normal friendships with anyone. The loneliness that Bronson’s Mechanic feels is present even during moments when he should be trying to escape it. The prostitute (Bronson’s wife second wife at the time, Jill Ireland) in the original is more than a simple fleshpot, she is a literary hooker, who is valued just as much (perhaps even more so) for her ability to compose beautiful, overwrought love letters designed to make Bishop feel emotionally alive in a way he can’t afford to be when he’s on assignment, than her physical assets. Even his decision to take on the young Stephen McKenna (Jan-Michael Vincent) as a protege is driven by the need to bond with someone and break the closed emotional fishbowl that he’s been living in for so long.  

It is tempting to lay the blame on the filmmakers for the flattening out of Bishop’s character that takes place in the remake. After all, it has long been a conceit, whether true or not that the screenwriters, directors and producers of generations X and Millennial produce far less literate work than their predecessors since they were raised on a steady diet of pop-culture junk food from comic books to kung-fu films. It’s tempting but it would be wrong. The blame really lies with us as a people, as a culture. The sad truth of the matter is that Bronson’s Bishop could never make it to the silver screen in this day and age. There’s just too much detail, too much character development, in short, too much reality for the movie going public to face for it to survive commercially. We’ve become far more interested in adolescent fantasies than the price it asks of the person living it. Sad, but all too true.