Action. R. 1 hour, 45 minutes. At area theaters.
“Killer Elite” is a guy’s movie and makes no bones about it. It’s an old-school, straight-no- chaser action picture about an ex-CIA agent who hunts down assorted troopers from the British Special Forces to save a U.S. agent from a vengeful Arab.
It pits Jason Statham against Clive Owen, the two marquee names among the current generation of British action stars. Statham is Danny, an ex-CIA assassin blackmailed out of retirement to hunt down Spike (Owen) and his British Special Forces colleagues. Robert De Niro is Hunter the kidnappee, who used to be Danny’s boss.
He’s being held hostage by an Arab sheik intent on revenge.
That sends Danny hither and yon, rounding up his own “team,” trying to take out guys nicknamed “The Clinic,” men who are just as lethal as he is. Danny and his crew must make the murders look like accidents, so there will be no reprisals. Standard killer-for-hire stuff, in other words.
What sets “Killer Elite” apart from, say, your typical stubbly-faced Statham B-movie actioner is the dialogue — reams of crisp, punchy, hard-boiled lines that co-writer/director Gary McKendry and screenwriter Matt Sherring cooked up or copped from the Ranulph Fiennes novel “The Feather Men”:
“I’m done with killing,” Danny mutters.
“Maybe killing isn’t done with you,” Hunter mutters back.
“Killing’s easy. Living with it’s the hard part.”
Government red tape and restrictions dog both the hunters and the hunted: “I’ve got no problem with blood. It’s ink that worries me.”
Thinking of double-crossing Danny? Maybe going into hiding afterward?
“Remember, everybody gets found.”
And there’s this pithy lecture on old soldiers: “No uniform. No war. You’re not ‘Special.’ They don’t know what to do with you. You don’t know what to do with yourself.”
McKendry, new to feature films, wanders a bit with subplots, giving us government intrigues, a love interest for Danny (Yvonne Strahovski) and other distractions. But he handles the assorted “hits” with gritty, period (early ’80s) flair. The film is “based on a true story,” so the setting is the early ’80s — a “time of crisis, revolution.”
It’s a decent yarn, built around veteran tough guys with just the right things to say — lines that smell of blood and gunpowder every time Statham, Owen or De Niro utter them.
