Arthur Bishop (Jason Statham) is an assassin that calls himself a mechanic, but it’s a misnomer. You get the impression that this latest thriller from Simon David (Con Air, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider) would have been more aptly titled “The Dentist.” Arthur doesn’t get his hands dirty, there is no grease on his elbows, and he rarely has to strain himself to get under the bottom of a job and give anything a hearty yank. There are scarcely any power tools involved.

Arthur is an OCD assassin, whose meticulous glass-walled home (with its elegant, dustless tube amp stereo and high-end phonograph that plays the piano concertos that calm him down after a job) is a reflection of the neat precision that characterizes his hits. In one scene,he does work on the engine of a vintage sports coupe — a shiny red James Bond-style two-seater — but even the parts are grime free. And when it comes to killing people, Arthur prefers to go through the mouth – choking, strangling, injecting, or suffocating. It’s cleaner that way. No blood. This won’t heart a bit. Won’t be long now. Tap me if this feels uncomfortable. “The Dentist.” Only good luck filling a theater with blood lusty audiences with a title like that.

If there’s a mechanic in this movie it’s Arthur’s unlikely pupil, Steve McKenna (Ben Foster), the son of Arthur’s old boss. Steve is the ying to Arthur’s yang — a blunt, bloodthirsty sadist who happily allows the clean jobs Arthur sets up for him to turn into messy, bruising affairs. When Arthur asks Steve to take out a beefy target by slipping poison in his drink at a bar, Steve opts instead to go home with the man (who has a habit of bringing young men home to his bed) and punch, slam, and smash his way towards the kills — the two flying though glass walls, toppling over bookcases, and covering themselves with blood and bruises in a violent dance. The scene is vastly more erotic than Arthur’s cheap sex scene with the movie’s lone female character, Sarah — played by former Victoria’s Secret model Mini Anden — which is tossed into the plotline like a scraggly piece of meat thrown to the hungry, expectant boys in the audience.

Why Arthur puts up with Steve is a mystery. The reason we are given is that the for-hire killer was paid to kill his own boss and Steve’s father, Harry McKenna (Donald Sutherland). Harry is accused by his business partner in this unexplained assassin corporation, Dean (Tony Goldwyn), of spoiling a hit in South Africa by leaking information about the operation. He’s a traitor, Arthur is told by Dean.

Only we’ve met the grandfatherly Harry, with whom Arthur has had a long and tender relationship, and we’ve met the sleazy, Wall Street-styled Dean, and any kid on the playground would know which of these two to trust. Arthur, for all his studied, murderous precision, doesn’t balk. He knocks off Harry and then feels bad about it, bringing on Steve as his pupil to compensate for his guilt. The thin setup feels like little more than an excuse to pair the gunman’s superego with the young man’s id. With Steve on board, whenever the two go out for a job, you know he’ll do something to create a jam, and we get to watch them shoot, spin, and swing their way out of it.

The Mechanic presents us with a number of scarcely intriguing loose ends — Steve’s instability, Dean’s suspiciousness, and a handful of tricky jobs — and the film’s excitement is supposed to be driven by the working out of the knots. It’s no more exciting than watching a baker carefully follow the instructions to complete a cake, and Simon David ends up feeling like the action director equivalent of his character, Arthur.

For its occasional spouts of blood and its one faintly interesting roof-top chase, The Mechanic never gets its hands dirty, never manages to find a twist or jolt anymore exciting or unexpected than a good car commercial. There’s the occasional decent joke, which usually comes at the expense of the movie’s own contrived appeal (when Dean tells Arthur he is going to have him knocked off, he yells into the phone that he is going to “put a price on his head so high, when you look in the mirror, you’re going to want to shoot yourself.”) And we naturally fall for Arthur, who provides that favorite combination of good guy habits and bad guy grit. But as we wait with less-than-anxious breath for that final, unsurprising climatic revolution, the movie’s methodic unfolding lulls us into bleary-eyed boredom. It is scarcely more an experience than the sitting in the front office of the local garage, waiting for your oil change.