Mindless action misfires in 'Killer Elite'
It's so good to see Robert De Niro back on the silver screen, shooting and beating up people once again.
Haven't we had enough of marshmallow, good-hearted De Niro stuck in mindless romantic comedies performing ridiculous shtick?
In "Killer Elite" (not a remake of Sam Peckinpah's 1975 thriller "The Killer Elite"), De Niro is back in action, battering heads, shooting thighs and assassinating assassins.
This is the De Niro we love.
His veteran special ops soldier named Hunter (I'm not kidding) is one of a kazillion personality-challenged bad guys who've lost their razors, constantly scowl and participate in chaotic, blurry fight scenes so quick and confusing they make Jason Bourne's <I>mano-a-mano</I> contests look like slow-motion poetry.
Danny (Jason Statham), a special ops soldier, almost gets killed in 1980 when he takes pity on a boy inside the car of a Mexican leader Danny has just assassinated.
"I'm done with killing!" Danny yelps.
Hunter, his mentor, replies, "Maybe killing's not done with you!" Because, don't all special ops mentors talk like this?
Flash-forward a year.
Danny's retirement gets rudely interrupted when he finds out a dying sheik in Oman has kidnapped Hunter and will kill him - unless Danny goes on one more mission.
Danny must:
1. Discover the locations of three British SAS operatives who killed three of the sheik's four sons.
2. Force the SAS operatives to confess on tape that they killed the sheik's sons.
3. Kill the SAS operatives who killed the sheik's sons.
4. Bring the confessions to the sheik before he dies.
With Hunter's life on the line, Danny apparently has no moral qualms about assassinating members of Her Majesty's secret military service.
But he gets brutal resistance from another secret group, the Feather Men, old, white-haired British guys who bring in SAS's Spike (Clive Owen) to protect Danny's three targets, and to eliminate Danny.
Except, of course, they don't know who Danny is. Yet.
"Killer Elite," directed by Gary McKendry, works very hard at being a full-throttle, bash 'em, slash 'em action movie that owes no debt to common sense or realism.
It succeeds brilliantly.
Statham races from one over-edited gladiator match to the next with gleeless abandon, donning the expression face of a man suffering from severe constipation.
Some fights go over the top with Danny jumping out second-story windows, not knowing where or how he will land, or performing amazing somersault attacks while still tied to a chair.
"Killer Elite" has been based on a fictionalized memoir by Ranulph Fiennes (not to be confused with Ralph Fiennes the actor), who exposed the workings of the Feather Men, a secret society called such because of its "feather-light touch" in manipulating political events around the globe.
How they accomplish this provides "Killer Elite" with some spooky global paranoia that first-time feature director McKendry (he directed the Oscar-nominated short "Everything in This Country Must") fails to capitalize upon.
Instead, McKendry goes for cinematic smackdowns between the Feather Men's forces and Danny's team (among them Aden Young and Dominick Purcell) and leaves in-depth character development for dead.
And who thought it was smart to cast cover-girl-grade gorgeous Yvonne Strahovski as Anne, the farm girl who falls in love with the mysterious Danny?
The scene of her handling bales of hay while wearing cowboy boots elicited laughs at a Monday night screening.
It looked like a farm photo shoot for Elle magazine gone horribly wrong.
<b>“Killer Elite”</b>
★ ½
Starring: Jason Statham, Robert De Niro, Clive Owen, Yvonne Strahovski
Directed by: Gary McKendry
Other: An Open Road release. Rated R for language, violence and sexual situations. 105 minutes