The Killer Elite

The Killer Elite was, hopefully, little more than a paycheck for director Sam Peckinpah, as the film is a frustrating, overlong, and ultimately silly endeavor.

The plot sees mercenary James Caan—after being betrayed and crippled by coworker Robert Duvall—recover to safeguard a Japanese politician and seek revenge.

There are glimpses, here and there, of Peckinpah’s genius. The film’s central conflict revolves around two men, once friends, now enemies after taking different paths to cope with a changing world; a reoccurring theme in Peckinpah’s work. Unfortunately, this theme is essentially lost amidst a silly kung-fu movie that no one takes seriously. According to the IMDB, Peckinpah said in a 1975 interview that his preparation for the film consisted of watching Bruce Lee movies. Watching the film, it’s easy to believe it.

At 122 minutes, The Killer Elite is at least 30 minutes too long. The film should end when the central conflict between Caan and Duvall is resolved, but instead that silly kung-fu plot rears up and drags the film on for another 15-20 minutes to include a ridiculous, an wholly illogical, sequence involving ninjas on an abandoned cargo ship. The kicker here, is that the film is such a mess by this point that this sequence actually stands out as one of the film’s most memorable, albeit for the wrong reasons, and to cap it off, Peckinpah had to dial back the graphic violence in order to earn a studio-mandated PG rating.

Maybe if the studio had given Peckinpah more control, or if he had taken the material more seriously, this could have been something special, but as is, it’s a disappointment.