The Mechanic by Michael Winner (1972)
Arthur Bishop (Charles Bronson) is a hitman who specializes in making deaths look accidental. He’s the best at what he does; calm and methodical, he spends days studying his marks, turning each assignment into a sort of heist. But after he’s forced to kill a colleague, Bishop takes on the man’s vain and sociopathic son as a protégé — a decision that soon puts Bishop in the crosshairs of the secretive criminal organization that utilizes his services. The Mechanic is most interesting when Bishop and his apprentice Steve (a pre-Airwolf Jan-Michael Vincent) wax philosophical about what it takes to be a hitman. And the secretive, globe-spanning organization that Bishop works for could be considered a precursor to the John Wick movies’ High Table. But The Mechanic struggles with a lack of focus, especially when it explores Steve’s sociopathy and narcissism. (As an aside, Lewis John Carlino’s original script had Bishop and Steve in a gay relationship, which basically made it unfilmable in the ’70s.) That, and Jerry Fielding’s bombastic soundtrack constantly tries to make the film more thrilling than it actually is. In the end, I mostly watched The Mechanic for Bronson, who’s never not interesting on the screen.
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