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Show Review 'Mechanic' a shoot 'em up by RICHARD BARNUM REECE Chronicle Staff This is a "shoot 'em up" which remembers the old school. There is no social comment. No message is splayed out to the audience in truncated bits of conventional truisms. This is one of those films which remembers those Saturday afternoons when you were shipped off to see Dracula meets Frankenstein. Only now the protagonists have mod hair-cuts. You still get the chance to squirm in your seat and wish they wouldn't do that. But they do and you stay 'till the very end of the show where everything is rescued by the denouement. As you leave you know you've been tricked into seeing a B-rated movie with no message but under pressure will admit that you thoroughly enjoyed it. You wouldn't have left that film for a Phi Beta Kappa pin or a Playboy Bunny (depending on your preference) or both. You were captured by that odd device, the narrative hook the minute you sat down in the seat Socko-City and the shoot 'em up genre entertained you. Unfortunately, as you leave the theater there is a time lag. The ellow walking next to you is using the High Noon shuffle." His eves areslittedand he does not turn his back to the crowd. This is not healthy. It is particularly unhealthy because as you check your reflection in the mirror you notice by the "Htgh Noon Shuffle " Charles Bronson is The Mechanic. A mechanic is a hit man for organized crime (a professional killer). It is possible to stretch the motivations for being a hit man into the realm of existential alienation and the defiance of the absurd as exhibited by a man who plays God and speaks of being "outside" standards of behavior. But to do so would belabor the truth of this movie: it's a fast action ac-tion shoot 'em up complete with Husqvarna moto-cross doing a hare and hound race over a new Lincoln automobile and through a lawn party; a seductive young girl committing suicide RIGHT BEFORE YOUR VERY EYES; and a super-duper car chase complete with sub-machine guns on the Italian Riviera. Sex, violence, ac tion, suspense and a chilling finale. What more is there?? Charles Bronson is a credible actor. He is complemented by one Jan-Michael Vincent who is the apprentice mechanic. Jan-Michael probably does summer stock. He looks the neo-Hamlet part. But alas, he has cast away art ana found work in a "pot-boiler,' la term which applies to writers who make $25,000 a year writing for True Detective et. al.). "Shoot em ups" may not rank high in the echelons of art forms but W1 seem to come through, for acto and audience, when the chips are down. , Why not go see it? Help W Union of Down and Out Actors ano Screenwriters. Mechanic is piaytnu at the Trolley Square Theater. |