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

Get it at Amazon.

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

Get it at Amazon.