Carrying the “inspired by true events” tag, Killer Elite is based on Sir Ranulph Fiennes’ controversial (and supposedly true) book centered on a group of professional mercenaries duped into carrying out someone else’s vendetta. The story the book tells seems to be in question, but the narrative is somewhat intriguing, yet the way it’s presented here is not only tiresome, but entirely implausible.
The film begins with a hit that ultimately goes all kinds of wrong, but when Danny (Jason Statham) notices a kid in the midst of the bullets and bloodshed he re-evaluates his decision to shoot people in the head for a living. The result? He retires to Australia, leaving his longtime partner Hunter (Robert De Niro) to twist in the wind and go on killing on his own. But don’t worry, this story finds a way to get Statham back in the action. You can’t keep “The Stath” away from violence and mayhem for too long as the bald Brit’s career has proven since the off.
Danny soon learns Hunter is being held captive and only he can save him. It turns out a Dubai sheikh wants revenge on a group of former British Special Air Services (SAS) operatives who killed three of his sons during the Oman war. Hunter came calling, but it proved to be a set up and to ensure the job gets done Danny has to kill three retired operatives, but first get confessions from each on video and make each death look like an accident. Just when Danny thought he was out they pull him back in, or as his handler puts it, “Maybe killing ain’t done with you.” Oh ho! Good one! Sigh.
So Danny is off, bouncing from here to there looking for his targets and assembling his team, but as he does, Spike (Clive Owen), a former SAS man with a particularly hilarious porn star mustache (it’s supposed to be a throwback to the film’s 1980s setting), catches a whiff of something afoul and reports back to an organization referred to as “The Feather Men.” This clandestine group of low-talkers is intent on keeping what happened in the past quiet and Spike is their bulldog, chomping at the bit to make sure fellow members of his group remain safe. So “The Feather Men” sick their little attack dog on Danny and his gang and the plot begins to play out… and play out… and play out…
Killer Elite goes on for so long I feel as if I may still be watching it. Oscar-nominated short film director Gary McKendry seems to have lost his way from short films to his first feature. Yes, Gary, I get it, Spike doesn’t want to feel as if his life has been wasted. Yes, Danny wants to save his friend, really likes that girl he left back in Australia and is really torn up over the fact he can’t tell her more about his past. Audiences have seen similar situations in a countless number of other films, there is nothing new here that needs anything more than a routine introduction. People aren’t turning up for a movie titled Killer Elite to wallow in the sorrows of trained assassins. They came to watch trained assassins do their thing in a reasonable amount of time. Get on with it and once your film has run its course, shut it down.
As the film moves on, the one thing I couldn’t help but notice was how Robert De Niro’s character goes from being a helpless captive to later on becoming a babysitter. De Niro must have read the script and saw his character only shows up at the beginning and the end with a couple of brief words of wisdom in-between and was happy to sign and cash the check. What’s next? A few minutes in New Year’s Eve? Good deal, wouldn’t want to work too hard.
Killer Elite is a standard actioner with a bloated running time in an attempt to masquerade as something more twisty and real world than it seems. I don’t know much about the actual conspiracy in Fiennes’ book, but I do know the events as depicted in the book were spread out over 17 years and not the few months it seems Killer Elite spans. The book seems to be considered by many to be fictional (thus the conspiracy), but no matter how you look at it, leaps in logic as explored here just seem silly.
I know the “inspired by true events” moniker is supposed to get us to feel like we’re watching something that really happened, but this film is so implausible it begins to work against itself. There seemed to be a problem balancing between the conspiracy and the action and while it would appear the action won out, the conspiracy is trying so hard to tell its story and yet is never allowed to give us enough information to gain a full grasp on what it is the film is dealing with. By the time the facts of the “real” case are shown on screen at the end of the film I really couldn’t have cared less.
