The Killer Elite

It's no secret that Sam Peckinpah, the once-masterful director of Ride the High Country, The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs, saw a massive exponential decline of talent as his intake of alcohol and nose candy increased. Exhibit A is The Killer Elite (1975), a complete and utter mess of a movie. In different hands it could have been an okay brainless action movie, but steeped in almost gleeful incoherence and idiocy, and cartoonish '70s paranoia, it's a disaster. That it's a Peckinpah film just adds insult to injury.

Mike Locken (James Caan) and George Hansen (Robert Duvall) are a pair of freelance assassins working for a private company who does dirty work for the CIA. During a job, Hansen kills one of their charges and cripples Mike (but inexplicably doesn't kill him). Eager for revenge, Locken takes on a new job: protecting a Chinese politician (Mako) targetted for assassination by a rival crime boss - the team of assassins led by Hansen. With his own team of killers - psychotic Jerome (Bo Hopkins) and mild-mannered driver Mac (Burt Young) - Mike seeks his revenge and sticks it to his former bosses as well.

On paper The Killer Elite has a glimmer of potential, but in practice it's completely squandered by Peckinpah's lazy, clearly-disinterested approach to the material. Instead of a straightforward revenge narrative/spy thriller (which could have made for a passable if cliched shoot-'em-up), the movie opts for incoherence; the film has no narrative drive, no flow, character motivations dropped whenever convenient (or not), scenes having seemingly no connection with one another. The fine cast - Caan, Duvall, Arthur Hill (A Bridge Too Far), Mako (The Sand Pebbles), Burt Young (Rocky), Bo Hopkins (The Wild Bunch) - seems monumentally bored with the material. The film engages in snarky half-baked cynicism about the CIA and US government that comes off as a lazy kick in the post-Watergate gonads.

As expected, Peckinpah handles the action scenes reasonably well, with a modicum of creative editing (eg. a running martial arts battle intercut with a briefing scene), but with everything else lacking, shootouts in isolation can only provide so much enjoyment. In any case, the final scene with Caan battling ninjas on a cruise ship using a walking cane ruins any small amount of good will we've mustered.

I don't feel like writing an in-depth review. Just take my word in these four paragraphs that this film sucks and watch The Wild Bunch again.