As played by Jason Statham, master assassin Arthur Bishop returns from 2011’s The Mechanic, but loses his “The” along the way to Mechanic: Resurrection. It’s a sequel for which no one was clamoring, given the tepid response to the 2011 film, itself a remake of the 1972 Charles Bronson vehicle.

Presumed dead and definitely retired, Bishop lives quietly and off the radar … until he’s tracked down and approached to perform three hits for a man named Crain (Sam Hazeldine, 2012’s The Raven). Bishop refuses … until Crain’s goons kidnap Bishop’s brand-new girlfriend, Gina (Jessica Alba, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For), and hold her as incentive. This works, even though Bishop literally just met her the day before, but hey, Gina’s a social-justice peacenik who runs a shelter in Cambodia for victims of human trafficking — in other words, she’s a keeper!

Bishop’s hit list, in order of preferred execution:
1. an Idi Amin-style warlord (Femi Elufowoju Jr., The Legend of 1900) holed up in an impenetrable Malaysian prison.
2. a billionaire (newcomer Toby Eddington) holed up in an impenetrable Australian high-rise.
3. an arms dealer (Jason Bourne’s Tommy Lee Jones, whose craggy face sports a stoopid goatee) holed up in an impenetrable Bulgarian fortress.

Employing disguises and MacGyver-ing the shit out of situations on the fly, Bishop is one smooth operator, reminding viewers of one Ethan Hunt, debonair agent extraordinaire for the Impossible Missions Force. In a likely not-accidental move on the part of director Dennis Gansel (We Are the Night), this Resurrection wants to reinvent itself as a Mission: Impossible holdover. In fact, Resurrection’s most memorable set piece — in which Bishop cracks open the glass bottom of a cantilever pool 76 floors above ground — directly recalls Tom Cruise’s skyscraper-crawling exploits in Ghost Protocol. (Not for nothing was this scene the centerpiece of the studio’s ad campaign.)

This movie, however, is a below-average ass-kicker whose three-kill structure feels like episodes of an as-yet-nonexistent Mechanic TV series slapped together to sell as a feature overseas. With the teacher/student relationship that drove The Mechanic’s plot machinations now gone (along with Statham’s co-star, Ben Foster, Hell or High Water), so has the one thing that made that movie stand out from the action pack. Statham (Furious 7) is not to blame; as always, he delivers, which is immediately obvious in the slam-bang prologue, an asinine yet irresistible melding of Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest and the goofy stunts of the 007 adventure Moonraker. What Alba is doing in such a small, thankless and insignificant part is anyone’s guess, so I’ll take one: to allow Gansel’s camera to admire her supple, cocoa-butter flesh? Yeah, it’s a gimme. —Rod Lott

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When you take your act from the big screen to the small one, you have to shout to get noticed. That could be why producer Irwin Allen’s made-for-TV movie Cave In! arrived in NBC prime time with an exclamation point intact.

At Yellowstone’s Five Mile Caverns, the north fork of the grounds undergoes a smidge of a rock collapse. Rather than close the tourist destination until the situation is fixed, the rangers on duty decide just to keep the tour groups away from that part. After all, a couple of bigwigs are on their way: a state senator (Susan Sullivan, TV’s Castle) and a crotchety professor (Ray Milland, Frogs). Ranger Gene (Dennis Cole, Death House) even was supposed to marry one of them; you guess whom. Among the few others along for the stroll are a sad-sack cop (Leslie Nielsen, just before Airplane! sent his career soaring in a different direction) and a short-fused fugitive (James Olson, Amityville II: The Possession). Wouldn’t you know it, that group gets trapped when boulders fall all around them and block off the obvious paths.

From there, it’s all about the saintly Gene leading them to safety … just as another saintly Gene (Hackman, that is) did the same in Allen’s The Poseidon Adventure. If director Georg Fenady (Terror in the Wax Museum) had excised his characters’ flashbacks to recent points in life when they weren’t stuck in a cave — each the stuff of soap operas — then Cave In! would look brazenly more like a drier remake of Poseidon, as Gene takes the men and women through nature’s obstacle course: tight crevasses, gaps over perilous heights, a rock path through a geothermal pit, underneath a submerged rock wall and across a rickety bridge made of wood and rope, neither to be trusted.

But Allen’s brand name can be, provided an undiscriminating, no-brainer disaster fix is all you seek. Compared to his blockbuster movies, Cave In! has less money and lower star power to work with, but does hold one unique advantage: getting the job done in about half the time. —Rod Lott

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Presumably without knowing, the sheer campiness of the beloved Batman live-action TV series of 1966-68 helped perpetuate the myth of Batman and Robin being homosexual lovers. Fifty years later, this animated feature spin-off has no designs on setting the record, er, straight; it opens in Wayne Manor, with young Dick Grayson practicing ballet moves in front of a roaring fire. Holy pas de deux, Batman!

Reuniting Adam West and Burt Ward — if only their voices — as the respective cowled detective and his Boy Wonder sidekick, Batman: Return of the Caped Crusaders pits Gotham City’s finest crimefighting duo against a foursome of their most fearsome foes: The Joker, The Riddler, The Penguin and “that dominatrix of deviltry,” Catwoman. The latter is voiced by Julie Newmar, one of three actresses to have filled that catsuit opposite West in the show and its 1966 big-screen adventure — a fact this film acknowledges with a wink as a noggin-conked not-so-Dark Knight sees her in triple vision, yet two of them look remarkably like Lee Meriwether and Eartha Kitt. The movie is full of kitschy digs like that, such as commenting on why everything in the Batcave is labeled.

And yet, for how purposely and appropriately silly it all is, it left me cold. Wally Wingert may have Frank Gorshin’s Riddler laugh down pat (assuming it’s not sampled straight from the old show), but Return of the Caped Crusaders feels more like a fan film than a real-deal reunion, as if it exists purely to wring dollars from nostalgia rather than because there was a new story to be told. It’s not bad — it’s certainly not drawn that way — but I quickly grew tired of its unrelenting need to poke me in the ribs. To be reminded of the TV series this much, I’d rather just watch the TV series. —Rod Lott

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Imagine Speed with a lazy mechanic in place of a mad bomber, and congrats! You’ve got yourself a pretty good grasp of what the made-for-TV movie Runaway Car is all about.

As nurse-in-training Jenny, Nina Siemaszko (Airheads) takes over the spunky Sandra Bullock role when her clunker of a Sedan — fresh from a half-assed lube — won’t quit accelerating as it glides down the highway. Beverly Hills Cop sidekick Judge Reinhold is Ed, the simpering computer nerd of a passenger, to whom Jenny has offered a ride. Children are put into mortal danger and Jenny even has to deal with a section of missing road.

For all its cinematic theft, Runaway Car is damned entertaining. More telefilms should be like this, and being steered by Jack Sholder (The Hidden) sure helps. See if you don’t feel a slight case of frazzled nerves as they try to remove an infant from the titular vehicle by hooking the tot to a rope dangling from a news helicopter! And then try not to laugh when said chopper nearly swings the baby into a highway overpass! By balancing dangerous situations with altogether ridiculous ones, this Fox network flick keeps your interest cruisin’ right along. —Rod Lott

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As Col. John Hogan barks to his recruits, “I ain’t the Army, ain’t the Navy, ain’t the Marine Corps! … I’m meaner than all of ’em!” While that is debatable, it is clear he is training the men to be the highest-paid mercenaries in the people-killing field. Hogan’s methods — effective, yet unorthodox — go something like this:
1. Abduct guys off the streets.
2. Drive them to the base, some 75 miles outside Los Angeles.
3. Steal their shoes.
4. Make them literally run for their lives into the woods.
5. Give chase and shoot freely until the poor saps are dead.

Footing the bill for this Most Dangerous Game is a steely-eyed suit (Troy Donahue, The Phantom Gunslinger) who shows up to deliver Hogan a one-month-or-else ultimatum: “Get this bunch of misfit mercenaries ready for action.” Perhaps so desperate as to be sloppy, the Hogan Squad kidnaps the wrong guy to become the latest Deadly Prey: Vietnam vet Mike Danton (Ted Prior, Sledgehammer), he of the big pecs and bigger blonde poodle mullet.

Shirtless and in cutoffs, Danton looks like Magic Mike meets M*A*S*H. Almost just as quickly as he’s given a running head start, our himbo hero turns the tables on Hogan’s zeroes. Camouflaging himself with a twig and a handful of brush, Danton aims to beat his captors on their home turf by Rambo-ing some shit up. An awful lot of bodies hit the floor before one of the gunmen notices: “Christ, we’re not huntin’ him! He’s huntin’ us!” Later surveying the swift reduction of his workforce with his own eyes triggers a tinge of recognition in Col. Hogan (David Campbell, Twisted Justice) …

Hogan: “This style! I know this style! It’s my style! … Danton? Mike Danton?”
Random Armed Lackey in Sunglasses: “Yeah, that was the name on the mailbox. You know him?”
Hogan: “Know him? I trained him.”

If I had written and directed this, I would have instructed Campbell to face the camera on those last three words as I zoomed in, all tight and dramatic and prepping my DGA acceptance speech.

But I didn’t; David A. Prior (Killer Workout) did. He may have missed that golden opportunity, but give the man this: Deadly Prey is nothing if not action-packed and then vacuum-sealed, so as not to let a single drop of testosterone leak out. It’s never boring.

Supposed grenades explode with all the impact of whatever a magician throws to the ground to create an instant smoke screen, but give the man this: He shoehorned in a meaningless role for B-movie legend Cameron Mitchell (Kill Squad), so your grandpa would have reason to rent the tape.

And Prior ends his movie abruptly, with highly questionable closure that left the plot open for his overdue sequel in 2013’s Deadliest Prey, but give the man this: He defied the odds and did what they said couldn’t be done. In essence, he filmed the unfilmable: the Cabela’s catalog. —Rod Lott

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