I know its been said before that there is 2 endings, but I have a gut feeling Arthur Bishop does fake his death. In my crazy mind, Could it be possible that Bishop takes a seperate flight to LA than steve, arrives just before Steve, plants the bomb and the letter and watches him explode. I might not be right, but you never know. Jeez these type of movies get to me.
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It never sat well with me that Bishop died. He was too damn COOL to go out like that!
I wouldn't be surprised if there is another ending in which he lives.
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Maybe Vincent wasn't man enough to kill him properly.
sharehahahahaa. i agree.
You've fallen in love with all the things in life that destroy men!
It just doesn't fit. If Bishop already knows that Steve will kill him, why does he drink the wine?
In my opinion Bishop knew he was going dying healthwise, for example when he had collapsed. The Doctor's mentioned that his health wasn't promising.
shareYou mean he didn't really care anymore?
shareBishop was suspicous of McKenna, remember he found the dossier on himself at Steve's house. Then he began a dossier on Steve.
So I think it was a game of cat and mouse on who would get who first. It would have been interesting to see the characters be more suspicous of each other in the movie.
I think Bishop put the bomb in McKenna's car before they went to Naples, just in case he didn't come back, just like his note said.
I completely agree. But every time i watch it , i like to think that Bishop is alive. Probably because it´s hard to see Charles Bronson die in a movie , specially in a great one like The Mechanic.
shareYeah, there should have been a sequel, with Bishop still alive. That would have been cool.
shareBut still , I always have the strange feeling that Bishop is around the house somewhere , I don´t no why. Maybe because of the way it is filmed.
shareI believe that Bishop never knew what was going to happen. He was just always prepared. He set that up just in case doing the trip he was betrayed. That way he could get his revenge.
When I originally saw it as a younger person, I thought maybe he did live. I guess it is up to the viewer. Still one of the better Bronson staring vehicles( and it shows what a great director Winner was before he became nothing but a cheap hired gun, look at his Oliver Reed films from the 60's)
NO- grasshopper- that was accute anxiety reaction. not a death terminal illness.
shareIn my mind Arthur Bishop died. He taught his student well to have some pinache about doing your victim in. The kid out-smarted him this time. So, what? If not him someone else because the organization was going to terminate him. Such is the lonley lilfe of an assassin.
shareBronson dies in the movie. He set the carbomb before they left, he knew the McKenna kid was gonna try to kill him, but he didn't know how or when, his letter just said "if you're reading this, it means i'm dead" or something like that, he never knew that the wine was poisoned. Bronson was a hitman who was getting towards the end of his career, him dying is a much better ending, it's nice and clean this way, but if he had lived, it would have been an uncertain ending to the movie, because healthwise he wasn't good and it appeared that he had fallen out of favour with his bosses, so even if he had lived, it would only have been a matter of time before something else killed him. Rather than him dying from a heart attack or some unknown hitman shooting him, it was much better that somebody he had trained did the job, also Bronson was smart enough to set a trap for the McKenna kid, so that even in death, his character still had the last laugh.
shareHe dies...end of story!
shareThis is one of my favorite movies -- I saw it first in the theatre when I was about 13 or so. I have never forgotten it.
Anyway, yours is an interesting question, but I also believe that Bishop dies in the end. I see it this way:
Bishop had been doing this long enough to realize that it wasn't bringing him any happiness at all. He was well paid but unbearably lonely -- he has to pay a hooker to pretend to be interested in him, for instance. Plus the aforementioned health problems he may have had, his trouble sleeping, etc.
I prefer to believe that he gladly drank the wine, suspecting that it may have been poisoned. I think the only person Arthur Bishop couldn't kill was himself, and something inside him was glad to have found this opportunity. Of course, he wasn't going to let McKenna do this for free and so planted the bomb before they left. Bishop was nothing if not thorough.
One other thing comes to mind as I type this. In the seventies no one was making sequels yet, or at least not many. A film could be self-contained rather than always painfully leaving an open ending so that the Hollywood machine can clean up with the profits from a sequel. This is a type of integrity that no longer exists maybe.
I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me.
If Bishop had faked his death and lived, I think he would have set the bomb in McKenna's car to blow-up after he had driven down the road aways and not blow-up at his own house. Uhhh....try explaining that to the cops.
shareThat makes sense yatman56, however I think the fire dep't back in the day had quicker response times...remember when Bishop blew up his first mark's apartment how quickly the fire dep't arrived? I guess he wasn't to worried about his house getting completely destroyed seeing how the fire dep't will probably show up in 10 secs flat LOL!!
shareBishop does not suspect the wine was poisoned. He drinks it because for one second, he's let his guard down around Steve, who saved his life on the boat. At that very moment he drinks from the glass, he's forgotten that Steve was assigned to kill him.
If Bishop had known he was being poisoned, he wouldn't be fighting for dear life while dying in agony in the Italian hotel room. He even asks Steve, "Was it because of your father?" Bishop's not even sure if Steve is getting revenge for Bishop's murder of his father. Knowingly drinking the poison, or at least suspecting it, would be careless and go against the character of Bishop we've gotten to know, who tried for the entire film to find some reason to *live*, not to die -- fine wine, fine art, luxury lifestyle, etc.
In my mind, there is not a chance Bishop "forgot and let his guard down" around Steve...he was a professional, the ultimate hit man and uber detail-oriented.
Bishop also knew at this point that he was sent to Naples under false pretenses in order to kill him, so he'd be on super-high alert, at every moment.
In fact, I rewatched that scene over and over, and Bishop actually hesitates with the wine glass in his hand, then seems to have a resigned, "ahh screw it" look, and downs the wine.
This would line up with several other people's hypothesis on this board, that Bishop was either terminally ill, or resigned to the fact that he had a hit on his life.
And why he was "fighting for dear life" when poisoned? This means nothing, a natural fight for survival when you know you're dying. Even people who commit suicide, tend to fight for their life as it is happening, you know, and don't just lie back peacefully and wait for the end.
makes you wonder if the 2010 remake will retain the original ending, or simply have Bishop outsmart the kid and drive off into the sunset.
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i didnt know there was 2 endings. where can i watch the second one? i also thought he faked. it definitely implied that until the movie just sort of ended.
You've fallen in love with all the things in life that destroy men!
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