Should of hired "Killer Elite" to take myself out

 “Killer Elite” sort of snuck into theatres in my eyes. Without it making much noise, I did not pay attention to it much at all. But once I saw that Jason Statham was in this movie, my interest grew. I genuinely like him in movies; he can usually entertain enough of me with his stunts to offset a bad movie.  But today I find out that this isn’t the chase for all movies, especially this one.


Danny (Statham) quits the mercenaries business after nearly failing his last mission. He wants to live a normal life with this girlfriend but of course he is brought back for one last mission. Hunter (Robert De Niro) is his long time mentor who has been captured and held prisoner. For Danny to free Hunter, he’ll need to kill 3 retired Special Air Services (SAS) members who murdered the three sons of Hunter's captor. But the paranoid SAS members are suspecting something and a secret agency call the Feathermen, a collection of Ex-SAS members, are destined to protect their members. The Feathermen ask Spike (Clive Owen) to get to the bottom of this and end the threat before any of their members are taken out.

Statham has one facial expression, even when staring down the barrel of a gun.

I’m not entirely too sure how this movie fails so hard as it did especially with the collection of Statham, De Niro and Owen. I can’t figure out how they couldn’t put together a great action-espionage movie. The three played their respected roles adequately and just how I expected them too. Owen is far the best one of the three, showing emotion and an ability to act, which is more than I can ask from Statham. De Niro brought his charismatic and quirky self and acted out the mentor fairly well. And then we have Statham who he kicked ass and to my pleasure with his shirt on, which is more than I can ask for out of a Statham featured movie.

But here is where the movie crumbles: the action, probably the one thing the movie should have done right. Statham usually has three key scenes: fist fights, car chases and of course him making out with a female. Strike one: fist fight which was filled with the holy trinity of awfulness; quick edits, terrible camera work and of course all this happens in the dark. So not only did I not know whose ass was getting kicked I wasn’t even sure if they were kicking at all. All of these fist fights were disappointing and not up to Statham quality. And for some reason after “Transporter” Statham needs to have a car chase through the narrow streets of (insert densely populated European city). And yet again, we have this in the streets of London, this is strike two. Again it had the potential to be interesting but was flawed when the final product appeared to have been filmed at a Wal-Mart parking lot with teenage boys, who think they are amazing right after getting their learners permit driving cars in a loop.

De Niro is one of the few saving graces.

And of course what kind of movie would it be if there was no damsel in distress. To key in the audience of Danny having some sort of emotion towards Anne (Yvonne Strahovski), they flash scenes throughout the movie of key moments in their life. This included; how they met, firing shot guns in the sky and them kissing. That is true love boys and girls. But wait, just when the two finally get real close, she gets taken away by the bad guys as a hostage. I never saw that coming! The movie really treats their audience like scum with a generic plot line and then slaps them in the face with the characters literally recapping the movie every 15 minutes or so. How dumb did they think their audiences were going to be? Oh ‘paying 13 dollars to see this pile of generic turd’ dumb. Unfortunately that was strike three.

To sum it all up, this is not only a bad movie it is also a bad Statham movie. I couldn’t even enjoy the action with these three big names accompanying it. And to top it all off and this was slightly expected, the story and plot was atrocious. I couldn’t care how the movie was going to end, as long as it was soon. There were a few times where I chuckled, but that was all because of De Niro being his fantastic self. This isn’t a movie you want to see in theatres, on DVD or ever. Do yourself a favour and skip this.