REVIEWS
GALA
US-Aus. 2011. 105mins Director Gary McKendry Production companies Open Road Films, Omnilab Media, Ambience Entertainment, Sighvatsson Films, Current Entertainment, Film Victoria, The Wales Creative Fund International sales Inferno,
www.inferno-
entertainment.com Producers Sigurjon Sighvatsson, Steven Chasman, Michael Boughen, Tony Winley Executive producer Christopher Mapp, David Whealy, Peter D Graves Screenplay Matt Sherring, inspired by the book The Feather Men, written by Ranulph Fiennes Cinematography Simon Duggan Editor John Gilbert Production design Michelle McGahey Music Johnny Klimek, Reinhold Heil Main cast Jason Statham, Clive Owen, Robert De Niro, Dominic Purcell, Aden Young, Ben Mendelsohn, Yvonne Strahovski, Adewale Akinnuoye- Agbaje, Firass Dirani
Killer Elite REVIEWED BY MARKADAMS
The headline casting combination of Jason Statham (for the muscles and action-man creden- tials) and Robert De Niro (for the veteran acting skills and a whiskery beard) works to limited effect in the period action movie Killer Elite, an oddly disjointed blend of thrills-and-spills and action drama that delivers a few nicely staged moments amid a whole lot of po-faced conspiracy nonsense. It is a mish-mash of a movie that feels as if sev-
eral storylines have been randomly laced together in the hope of creating an action film that can appeal to Statham’s extensive fanbase. And while never overly successful, the best moments in Killer Elite do come in the scenes Statham and De Niro have together, making you wish that more had been made of a promising project. For the record the film is no relation to Sam
Peckinpah’s 1975 movie The Killer Elite — which featured James Caan in a leg brace taking on ninjas — but instead is based on Ranulph Fiennes’ 1991 book The Feather Men, supposedly a non-fiction story about SAS soldiers going up against a team of the world’s elite mercenaries on a revenge mission. It would have been an easy move for the film-
makers to take the story, set it in the modern day and simply leverage in as many machine guns, martial-arts moves and explosions as possible. So they deserve enormous credit for setting it largely in the 1980s and putting in a great deal of effort in terms of production design, costumes and general look of the film. Killer Elite opens in Mexico in 1979, with merce-
naries Danny (Statham) and Hunter (De Niro) waiting for their next target. Danny kills with ruth- less efficiency, but cannot bring himself to dis- patch a young boy who is with the target. Danny
n 16 Screen International at the Toronto Film Festival September 10, 2011
decides to give up his career as an assassin-for-hire and heads off to a new life in Australia. A year later and he is forced to take up arms
again when a letter arrives. Hunter is being held hostage in Oman by a sheikh who wants Danny to take on a dangerous mission in return for Hunter’s life. To secure his release, Danny must head to the UK and kill three former SAS soldiers who had been involved in the deaths of the sheikh’s sons during the war in Oman. Danny pulls together his old team — ex-para-
trooper Davies (Prison Break’s Dominic Purcell, sporting a drooping Zapata moustache) and Meier (Young) a techno-geek — and heads off to the UK to plan their attacks on the ex-SAS men. The fly in the ointment is that the targets are protected by a shadowy group known as ‘The Feather Men’, whose tough frontman is former soldier Spike (Owen). As Danny and friends put their plans into
action, they find themselves on a collision course with a band of tough-as-nails former SAS soldiers
who will do all they can to protect their own. Danny, though, is determined to do all he can to secure the release of his friend and mentor, and has the skills and determination to take on some of the best Special Forces men in the world. When Statham and De Niro are on screen
together in the opening scenes, the film has a real sense of energy. The dialogue might be rather cli- chéd and trite, but Statham has real action-man charisma and De Niro looks as lean and mean as he did while wielding a machine gun in Ronin or Heat. Sadly for much of the film De Niro is not around — he is busy growing his beard in the sheikh’s dungeon — and Statham is left to his own devices to take on the SAS men. The staging is very nice — good use of old cars
and period costume — but these UK action scenes feel rather pedestrian, though things do improve in the scenes during which Statham and Owen have their various stand-offs. The whole conspir- acy element feels plodding and cumbersome, and tends to hold up the drive of the film rather than aid its plot development. To humanise Statham’s character, there is a
whole subplot about his burgeoning relationship with Anne (Strahovski), the beautiful woman who owns the ranch next to his in Australia. It is a rather underdone and empty role for Yvonne Stra- hovski, who is best known — ironically — for her high-kicking action moves in TV series Chuck, where she plays a deadly government agent. While Killer Elite does offer enough moments of
high-adrenaline thrills to appeal to action fans, it never really ignites as a period thriller. De Niro’s return to gun-toting action in the final section helps things end with a flourish, but it does not help Killer Elite from being any more than a film of mis-matched sequences and lost opportunities.
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