Killer Elite
There haven’t been many modern action heroes in the last
decade to pick up the mantle left by 80’s action kings Schwarzenegger,
Stallone, and others. I guess Matt Damon could be considered one, but only for
the three Bourne movies. And Daniel
Craig, despite being this generation’s James Bond, has a very diverse acting
career in other genres. That leaves Jason Statham as the only pure action hero
working now, with the Transporter and
Crank franchises giving him plenty of
work. Of course, being a primarily action actor means working in a lot of
B-level action flicks that are pretty bad, and Statham’s new vehicle Killer Elite sadly falls into that
category.
Plot Synopsis: Danny,
a former mercenary who got tired of the profession, is brought back into the
fray when his mentor Hunter is held captive by an oil sheikh. The sheikh holds
a personal grudge against the British Special Air Service, who are is
responsible for killing three of his four sons, and he wants Danny to finish
Hunter’s job by assassinating the three S.A.S. agents responsible for the
deaths of his sons. On the other side of the story, Spike is a part of a group
of former S.A.S. agents who call themselves the Feather Men. They want Spike to
clean up the mess brought about by the murder of their agents, which is where
Danny and Spike’s missions intersect with each other.
Killer Elite is
similar to another Statham vehicle, The
Bank Job, in that both of them try to be more than just another average
action movie. The difference is that The
Bank Job succeeded in that regard, and Killer
Elite doesn’t. Elite attempts to
weave the slam-bang action we expect from these movies with a conspiracy
thriller plot in an attempt to be something more. But problems arise when
neither one of these are particularly good.
The conspiracy plot is tedious and not especially
compelling, so the long breaks between the action feel much longer and drawn
out. And even the action scenes themselves, while competently made and
occasionally entertaining, are pretty average and forgettable. The best one
involves Statham and Clive Owen going at each other in a fistfight, which was
brutal and fun despite some confusingly shot moments.
Back to the drama and plot; the sequences with the Feather
Men are tiresome and repetitive, dragging the movie down with boring
exposition. Danny is saddled with a girlfriend who is supposed to bring
sympathy to him, but has almost no impact on the plot and she could’ve been cut
out of the script without affecting any of the major events.
Now Statham is a charismatic action hero, one whose gruff
voice and charming personality rarely fails to entertain despite his lack of
range. He’s fine in this movie, but when stripped of much of his humor and
saddled with leaden dialogue that unearths every known cliché in the book, the
cracks in his one-note persona begin to show. Him and Robert De Niro (Hunter)
have good chemistry in their few scenes together, however De Niro disappears
for much of the film and doesn’t get a lot to do except beat up one guy near
the end. Clive Owen is the better of the three main players, who is not the
villain as the trailer suggests, and he makes Spike arguably more sympathetic
than Danny.
Perhaps Killer Elite’s
issues have more to due with the drab execution and writing by first-timer Gary
McKendry than anything else. McKendry’s only previous experience is the short
film Everything in This Country Mist,
which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Short Film, and maybe he
wasn’t able to piece together a full-length feature without resorting to tired
clichés seen in other, better movies. It’s hard to make 105 minutes feel long
for a movie, and Killer Elite would
probably be better watched at home with a bunch of friends who won’t be paying
attention during the convoluted and boring parts anyway.
1.5/4 Rating Criteria
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