Killer Elite

Year 18, Day 84 - 3/25/26 - Movie #5,283

BEFORE: Jason Statham carries over from "A Working Man" and is now tied for first, with five films watched this year - you know what comes after that...

And the fill-in nouns for tonight's "Merc Madness" mad-libs are former special ops agent, old/new girlfriend, mentor, and British SAS paratroopers. Just insert those into last night's plotline blanks and we'll all be on the same page. 

THE PLOT: A special-ops agent returns from self-imposed exile to rescue his kidnapped mentor. 

AFTER: I hadn't heard of this film at all, not until it started streaming and it turned up on one of my monthly add-in sessions. But it seemed like maybe a minor Jason Statham film if I hadn't ever heard of it before, so it made some sense to wait until I had like 5 or 6 Statham films lined up, you know, just in case I needed to bury it in between two good ones and burn it off. The advantage of having six Statham films connected in a block is that, in addition to filling nearly a week on the calendar and getting me closer to the next holiday, I can move them around in almost any order, as long as I can find a proper entry into the block, I've then got at least a dozen good exits, everyone from James Franco to Winona Ryder to, well, now Clive Owen and/or Robert De Niro. I do have a couple De Niro films on the list in a much smaller block - just "The Comeback Trail" and "The Alto Knights" and a couple documentaries, but I'm going to follow a different link out of this mini-chain because that gets me to Easter on time. Knowing that De Niro links to docs could be helpful, but I'm not ready to cut to the Doc Block just yet, it's more of a summer thing. 

The danger in putting De Niro AND Clive Owen in a Jason Statham film is that it's then something less, and also more, than a Jason Statham film. It's not uncommon for him to get most of the screen time in an action film these days, they probably build the whole film around what stunts he wants to do or what vehicles they want him to blow up. But I think that just like Franco and Ryder in "Homefront", they worked the other two mega-stars in pretty well here. De Niro plays the lead character's ex-partner and mentor, while Clive Owen plays the enforcer for the Feather Men, a secret society of former U.K. military operatives who look out for each other, just in case somebody tries to track them down and gain revenge for what they did during wartime in the Middle East. Funny you should mention that, because...

Danny Bryce is an ex-mercenary who retired after a job where he had to kill a man right in front of that man's child. He moved to Australia and lives a quiet life, camping mostly. But one day he gets a package with photos of Hunter, his mentor, who is being held captive in Oman, so he returns to meet with "The Agent" who tells him that Hunter was unable to complete a merc job and is now being held by a sheik who won't release him until someone completes the mission for him. For the sake of Hunter's kids, Danny travels to Oman and agrees to complete the job. Well, first he tries to break Hunter out, but when that doesn't work, he takes the gig. The job is to kill three U.K. SAS troopers who killed three of the sheik's sons during the Dhofar Rebellion.  The sheik is getting older and his health is going, he feels he needs to get vengeance for his sons before he dies, otherwise he won't have a great afterlife - no virgins waiting for him there.

Danny not only has to figure out who and where these men are, but also get them to confess on videotape to war crimes, and then make their deaths look like accidents, and also return to Oman with proof that the job was done right. Danny hooks up with two of his merc buddies, Davies and Meier, promising them each half of the $6 million cut, leaving nothing for himself. Well, at least his heart's in the right place. The first guy goes down pretty easy, after they record his confession the plan was to make it look like he slipped on a loose tile and struck his head in the bathroom - which might have worked if the police just ignored the big bullet hole in his brain. 

When the team starts asking questions in a pub frequented by SAS veterans, somebody tips off the Feather Men, who (eventually) become aware that somebody is killing off these retired soldiers, but they're not sure who's doing this and why. Meanwhile Danny learns that their second target is going to participate in a veteran's march on a mountain range - you know, just for fun. So he slips in and puts drugs in the guy's coffee thermos which put him into shock and hypothermia during the march. (There's another guy that the team tries to kill here, named Martin and played by Ben Mendelsohn - I'll admit I was very confused by this part, because he's not on the list, and also he gets away, and I wasn't sure if this was a flashback scene, or if not, how it fit into the larger story...it takes place in the desert, and I don't think there are many deserts in the U.K.)

The team tries to take out the third guy with a job scam, they phone him and tell him about a job interview, to lure him from his house, so they can figure out how he's going to drive there and get him in a head-on collision with a remote-controlled truck, er, lorry. This part of the plan works, but a suspicious member of the Feather Men witnessed the crash, and spotted Danny's men while they were trying to confirm the kill. Now the Feather Men know for sure that someone is targeting ex-soldiers and taking them out, meanwhile Danny thinks his job is done, however some soldier has written an expose about the military operation and it comes to light that there is a FOURTH soldier who needs to be killed - those damn sheiks, always moving the goalposts...

(It's a bit clunky here, but the fourth man they need to kill is Ranulph Fiennes, whose expose on the military operation is apparently also the book titled "The Feather Men", which is the book this film is based on. This was a little bit too meta, even for me, it reminds me too much of the film "Adaptation", which was adapted from a book of the same name, which isn't possible, it just goes around and around like a chicken-egg thing. You can't have a film based on a book and then within the film's universe, there is also that same book.)

By now the Feather Men realize they have to protect the fourth soldier - if he doesn't finish his book, then they can't make a movie out of it, and all of them will then cease to exist. So they put him in a safe house and protect him with like 100 undercover guards, but Danny just sends in someone else dressed like him, only wearing a motorcycle helmet, and while everyone is trying to catch that guy, he sneaks in the back way and shoots the soldier. Only he doesn't kill him, he only incapitates him so he can take photos of his body lying on the ground, to fool the sheik.  NITPICK POINT: If he could take a photo of his target pretending to be dead, basically create a fake photo and deliver that to the sheik without killing anyone, why didn't he just do that in the first place? The sheik was pretty old school, if you show him a fake photo and a phony newspaper, he'd probably believe that the job was done. 

Anyway, after making sure that his girlfriend is safe in Paris, where Hunter's been keeping an eye on her, Danny and Hunter head back to Oman with the fake pictures, not just to get the money, but to have the job declared done so they can live out their lives without looking over their shoulders. But Logan, the enforcer for the Feather Men, gets there first and has other ideas about how to end things. The three men then part ways and they're all unofficially retired, unless somebody decides to make a sequel to this, which wouldn't be the worst idea. 

Directed by Gary McKendry

Also starring Clive Owen (last seen in "Ophelia"), Robert De Niro (last seen in "Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution"), Dominic Purcell (last seen in "Equilibrium"), Aden Young, Yvonne Strahovski (last seen in "Manhattan Night"), Ben Mendelsohn (last seen in "Cyrano"), Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (last seen in "The Union"), David Whiteley (last seen in "Knowing"), Tony Porter (ditto), Matt Nable (last seen in "Son of a Gun"), Lachy Hulme (last seen in "Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga"), Firass Dirani (last seen in "Hacksaw Ridge"), Nick Tate (last seen in "Cry Freedom"), Bille Brown (last seen in "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader"), Stewart Morritt, Grant Bowler, Michael Dorman (last seen in "The Invisible Man"), Daniel Roberts (last seen in "Mission: Impossible II"), Rodney Afif (last seen in "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales"), Jamie McDowell, Dion Mills, Andrew Stehlin (last seen in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny"), Simon Armstrong, Richard Elfyn (last seen in "Six Minutes to Midnight"), Chris Anderson, Brendan Charleson, Sandy Greenwood, Boris Brkic (last seen in "The Proposition"), Riley Evans, Sofia Nikitina, Tim Hughes (last seen in "Quigley Down Under"), Michael Carman, Salim Fayad, Kristy Barnes-Cullen, Kate Neilson, Zane Dirani, Mohamed Dirani, Michael Dirani, Emily Jordan (last seen in "The Master")

RATING: 5 out of 10 sideburns (well, it WAS set in the early 1980's)