If you're in the mood for an action movie and are a big fan of the whole 'Transporter' oeuvre, don't be fooled into thinking this movie is ANYTHING LIKE THAT.
This is a very very bad movie. And believe me when I say I'm no harsh critic, I'll watch anything. I love Jason Statham's other knuckle-headed movies, I like explosions and car chases and insane high-speed fights that make you go "ooooooooooo" from between your teeth. Sadly 'Killer Elite' does not have enough of these things to lift it out of the mire of execrable dialogue, horrible editing and the hackneyed, cliché plot it's been saddled with.
My first (and ongoing) problem was the casting of Dominic Purcell (an American) as Davies, an ex-Services Cockney who spent some of the movie apparently pretending to be a Welshman (although there was no way to discern which accent was which). All I can imagine is that someone gave Purcell a load of old Ealing comedies as research material, because the resulting accent was god awful, and frankly so ridiculous it transformed his (clearly supposed to be) larger-than-life character into a complete parody. At best he was distracting, but at worst he was like Olly Reed on crack.
Next we had Clive Owen (aka Spike Logan the improbably named nemesis). With a glass eye. And a weaselly bum-fluff moustache. The glass eye I could have excused, except that for some strange reason it was grey and a bit like a cat's eye, and no-one bothered to explain why that was. The moustache was just silly. I like to think Owens was just having a laugh and grew it to demonstrate that, because otherwise I can't imagine the reasoning behind it. It's the 80s not the 70s, no-one had a moustache unless they were your dad's mate Bernard who he always warned you about accepting lifts from.
Third on my lists of wtfs, comes the addition of Yvonne Strahovski's character; the winsome blond Australian girl (oh wait she's Polish/American isn't she?) who Danny remembers from his childhood. After he's quit the game and reconnects with his roots, there she is, with her beautiful face and lovely smile and delicate features and suddenly he feels all warm inside and wants to stop shooting brown people in the face for money forever.
My problem with this particular plot-point is WHO GIVES A FLYING CR*P? This is an *action movie* about professional assassins. There is no place for a protagonist who periodically stares into the middle distance thinking about rolling in puppies and flowers with a wholesome blond girl who he longs to marry and settle down with. No place. Not only does the whole subplot with her feel tacked on, it also feels a little insulting; as if women need something like this to keep them engaged and help them connect. We don't. We like the explosions and the car chases just like you do. If we'd wanted action + schmoopy romance we would have rented 'Date Night'.
There is so much bad, chain-linked to bad in this movie it's hard to list it all in a short review, but I'll just summarise with a few of the questions that were left unanswered for me when the credits rolled:
1) What kind of accent was Aden Young attempting? He may have been German, he certainly looked German with the tiny glasses and Kraftwerk moustache.
2) Why would a trained assassin (DeNiro as Hunter) trying to escape a compound secretively, shoot a man in the head with an un-silenced gun and alert every guard in the place to his whereabouts?
3) Why, when you are using a map as a visual explanation of a route covering roughly 2 square miles, would you use an ordnance survey map of the whole of south east England?
4) Why would an black guy in a position of power wear a tiny black trilby hat that makes him look like a Yardie? And finally
5) If you shoot someone in the leg and then plan on telling everyone he's dead, you might want to be sure he isn't someone famous or likely to become terribly famous and have two famous sons and everything.
I have no understanding or explanation for the other stellar reviews of this movie. Maybe all these people were stoned. It is a terrible film with an awful, sprawling, messy plot that finally makes little sense and not enough action sequences to make up for the horrible dialogue, hammy performances. Plus it has a stupid stupid ending involving RANULPH FIENNES. Yes, the *real* Ranulph Fiennes, who - to my knowledge - has never been shot in the leg by a mercenary who had been hired by a dying sheikh to avenge the deaths at the hands of SAS soldiers of his three sons.
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