Killer Elite
Director: Gary McKendry
Writer: Matt Sherring
Based on: Ranulph Fiennes‘ book
Cast: Jason Statham, Clive Owen, Robert De Niro, Dominic Purcell, Aden Young, Yvonne Strahovski

Plot:
Hunter (Robert De Niro) and Danny (Jason Statham) are part of a very successful group of assassins. But Danny has had his fill and retires, only to be pulled out of retirement when his mentor and friend Hunter gets kidnapped by a sheikh in Oman. To free Hunter, Danny has to take out three SAS agents who are responsible for the deaths of the sheikh’s sons. But the SAS has their own defense group and so Spike (Clive Owen), part of said group, picks up Danny’s trail.

Killer Elite was, unfortunately, disappointing and mostly boring. I guess that’s what happens when you show the best things in the damn trailer and the rest doesn’t even get close.

I’m not embarassed to admit that I have a thing for Jason Statham (well, maybe I’m a little embarassed), even though I really can’t explain why. I also have more than just a thing for Clive Owen and (even though he has a funky eye and, much worse, a moustache in this one) I know exactly why. And even when I disregard the guys’ hotness completely, both usually make very good action movies.

Add to that Robert De Niro (whose character does not turn out to be a traitor, as I expected from the trailer and generally features very little) and you have pretty good chances of getting a very decent film. But unfortunately, it was apparently not supposed to be.

The intro was very nice, kind of the perfect dystopia set-up and then the small note that it’s the reality of 1980. That actually had me laughing out loud. But it went all downhill from there. The fights would have been pretty cool, if we had seen more of them. But instead we got a lot of annoying as hell shaky cam. Thanks for that.

And the characters’ motivations remained unclear at best. Maybe you would have had to read the book before to understand it all, or know more about the SAS and the politics of the 80s than I do, but I was mostly confused by everybody behaving the ways they did. But I’m also not interested enough to do any more research. If the film already sucked, despite all the fight sequences we got to see, I don’t want to spend any more time on the subject.

Summarising: you can’t win them all and this one is definitely not a winner.