Dennis Gansel
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Connections, in both directions
There is a lot to We Are the Night that feels very familiar, and horror fans who grew up in the 80s will recognize influences by vampire films of that era, including The Lost Boys and Near Dark.
At first, with its roster of self-sufficient women who have deemed men useless, the film seems to be pushing a hardline lesbian angle, like a rejoinder to the gay themes behind something like The Lost Boys.
In fact, watching Statham in Mechanic: Resurrection made me think of a sequence in Peter Bogdanovich's documentary on John Ford, Directed By John Ford.
The 2011 film – itself a remake of a 1972 release starring Charles Bronson (Death Wish) – made just $29 million domestically against a production budget of $40 million, but its $62 million worldwide cume was apparently strong enough for Summit Entertainment to eventually develop a sequel.
Much like the Death Wish sequels, this is a film that expands into utterly ridiculous territory after its predecessor took at least mild stabs at gravitas.
The pair are not helped by sycophantic, hackneyed direction and writing during this time, which includes overly dramatic, tawdry back-stories, swells of emotional music and even a sex scene montage that feels like it's been ripped straight from The Room.
On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969)
Directed by Peter R. Hunt
influenced Mechanic: Resurrection (2016)
Visuals
Then Tommy Lee Jones shows up, wearing the wardrobe of a Eurotrash playboy, as a weapons dealer with a circular lair that evokes the one in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.”
“Mechanic: Resurrection” is the movie “The Mechanic” should have been — a bite-sized Bond film, or maybe a grittier homicidal knockoff of the “Mission: Impossible” series, with a lone-wolf renegade as the entire team.
A poor man’s Mission: Impossible (which I guess makes it MacGyver by default?), Mechanic: Resurrection is a flat and tedious action film that elicited the most lethal response possible when I asked my movie date what she thought after the credits rolled: “boring.”
The Mechanic sequel is a mid-budget Bond mix tape, with a judicious drop of Mission: Impossible thrown in.
See, Crain (Sam Hazeldine: The Huntsman: Winter’s War , Grimsby ), an old acquaintance of Bishop’s who is Very Bad Indeed, wants to eliminate his rivals, Krill (Femi Elufowoju Jr.: The Legend of 1900 ), Cook (Toby Eddington), and Adams (Tommy Lee Jones: Jason Bourne , Hope Springs ).
Action films like Commando, Cobra, Broken Arrow or even Lara Croft: Tomb Raider inhabit this place.
Since his breakout role as a modern action icon in The Transporter, Jason Statham has played similarly steely-eyed badasses time and again, including in franchises like The Expendables and The Fast and the Furious.
Bishop is empathetic to her plight; after all, he was once an orphan himself, and during that entire conversation you might start to wonder if screenwriters Philip Shelby and Tony Mosher are admirers of Black Dynamite.
But this isn’t The American; there will be no further analysis of the existential angst of the hired killer here.