Jason Statham stars in this remake of the classic Charles Bronson film. To be honest I was expecting beforehand to completely hate this purely because it was a remake of something so good, I was delightfully surprised…

This remake pretty much followed the original with a bit of modernizing and extra twists and turns dropped in for better affect. In a lot of ways it was a standard Statham action fare, but if I am being completely fair he did do the original work justice.

As I like to do with a lot of remakes, you just really have to ignore the fact that this is a film based on another film and look at it as a separate work. Whilst you can then still see glaring similarities, you will also enjoy the extra interpretation the new director adds.

In some ways this approach worked for The Mechanic, but you could also not get away from the fact that Statham captured brilliantly the broodiness and detachment of the Bronson character in the original. Frankly it is hard to ask the question “was it as good as the original” as the new version of The Mechanic is such a good film in its own right.

A bit of a classic film from the hey day of Governor Schwarzenegger, when grunting and flexing his biceps pretty much got him through every scene.  That’s not to say that Arnie did not make slightly better films after this as his range improved, but Red Heat was still firmly steeped in the days of grunting!

Arnie plays a hard-nosed Russian cop sent out to America to intercept a Russian gangster. Jim Belushi wise-cracks his way through an hour and a bit with reference after reference to masturbation (well that seemed to be what most of his lines were about) and does a fairly good job as his local cop babysitter. Laurence ‘Larry’ Fishburne looking very thin and young plays a somewhat straight fellow cop who tut’s and huffs about Belushi throughout.

Not much here in the way of story or character development, but it stands up quite well against similar films of the ilk coming out in recent years. Call it a guilty pleasure.