The Killer Elite

Have you ever watched someone deliberately sabotage their work? Approach a project with the intent of burning it to the ground? While in grad school, I sat stunned as a classmate brazenly presented a Power Point prepared by someone else and claimed it as her own. She did nothing to hide this, as some slides had the authors' names clearly designated.

She also stammered and appeared as if she threw the thing together not 10 minutes prior. The embarrassment and disbelief was thick in the auditorium that afternoon. It was squirm inducing but also morbidly fascinating. To watch someone crash and burn so throughly, so dramatically and have it seem like it was premeditated, utterly calculated. Or maybe it was the side effect of burnout? Apathy. Our program was grueling, and maybe she just had enough. Most people at that point take a leave of absence, or withdraw. The drama limited to a written letter. Not my classmate. She either lit the match herself or simply watched an already smoldering hulk reduce to ash and did nothing to stop it.

Watching 1975's odd THE KILLER ELITE was a somewhat similiar experience for me, without perhaps the immediacy. Of course I never socialized or knocked back a brew with director Sam Peckinpah as I had with my classmmate, but having studied his films over the years and read interviews, I feel as if I have some understanding of his point of view; I'm a great admirer of his work. His films were in the great tradition of the macho cinema of Henry Hathaway, John Ford, and William Wyler before him, but taken to lengths the Code would've never approved in the earlier decades.

So how disheartening it was to watch this claptrap of a movie. In THE KILLER ELITE, the CIA employs the services of private agencies of hitmen/spies, people like Locken (James Caan) and Hansen (Robert Duvall). Their assignments include escorting defectors from Communist countries and protecting dignataries. Locken and Hansen have long been a working team and good friends. But friendship is cheap when a rival agency (still under the auspices of the CIA) buys off Hansen to kill one of the defectors he's supposed to be protecting. Hansen will also fire shots into Locken's elbow and knee, leaving his compadre to suffer an agonizingly long rehabilitation.

The viewer also suffers. For some reason, Marc Norman and Sterling Silliphant's script spends an inordinate amount of time with Locken as he learns to walk again. Peckinpah sets nearly a fifth of this movie in the hospital. I didn't mind the idea of the film taking its time to establish a relevancy to the overall storyline, but, when you establish in the opening scenes that the film is to be a popcorn thriller (note the idiotic opening crawl), you can't grind the pace to a halt. In the context of this movie, one 30 second scene would've given us the information we needed. If THE KILLER ELITE had been a thoughtful drama (like Caan's earlier BRIAN'S SONG), the many and lengthy rehab scenes would've been appropriate.

The plot then involves Locken's eventual return to action (he even learns some martial arts during his hiatus) and new assignment to protect an Asian client long enough so he can return to his mother country, where, as the man says, he will be killed anyway. An airport ambush, uncharacteristically awkwardly staged by the director, almost does the client in. Is it believable that Locken, ambulating about with a cane, is sufficiently healed to get back in the game? Even as he assembles a team of former cronies for this new mission, the whole thing is pretty implausible.

What Locken also doesn't know is that his own agency has also hired now-nemesis Hanson to assassinate the Asian. Seems that their superiors Collis (Arthur Hill) and Weybourne (Gig Young) are at war with each other and vying for power. Spy story fodder indeed, but as good a stage as any on which to set an effective tale of revenge.

Doesn't quite happen that way. In fact, several scenes suggest that the actors and director didn't give a damn about this movie (and may have not so passively tried to sink it). Peckinpah was a mere gun for hire on this project, a job he was lucky to get as he had become a pariah in the studio system. But to say his heart wasn't in it is an understatement. What to make of a scene where Lochen meets the not-quite-there female employee/assistant of one of his cronies, the getaway driver, Mac(rumpled and gruff Burt Young, best known for his turns as Pauline in the ROCKY movies). The woman just stands there adrift, completely spaced out. Then Caan becomes distracted as he speaks with Mac, himself going into the fog. This goes on for over a minute, as if everyone (crew included) fell asleep. I watched it again and wondered if I missed something.

How about the scene in the strip club, where Hansen is outlining his mission with some other agency goons? Why does Peckinpah repeatedly cut to the dancers on stage when important plot points are being discussed (we still hear them speak, but the noise of the club almost drowns them out)? Sure, once or twice for the requisite topless quotient (though this is a PG-rated film), but.... Bizarre.

My favorite has to be the scene with the thoroughly dumb cop Locken and company encounters while hightailing it from a downtown shootout. After pulling the gang over, the officer discovers that Mac has retrieved a bomb from under the vehicle. Rather than citing them for something or other, he instead grabs the explosive from them and runs away (we hear the blast a minute later). Was this supposed to be off-the-wall humor? There's absolutely no effort at comic timing here so I can only again conclude that someone was trying to sabotage this movie. Maybe everyone was in on it. A perfect tax write off?

But the nadir comes during the climax set aboard a military vessel, where everyone meets for a final showdown. A group of the sorriest ninjas you've ever seen engage in fights with the "good" and "bad" guys. The choreography is so third rate that it seemed as if there was no direction at all. As if Peckinpah hung up his bullhorn and went home, hoping maybe the second unit would take over. So goes the whole movie. If you like cheesy 70s dramas with (unintentional?) laughs, this may be worth a few minutes. But how sad to be saying this about the man who directed THE WILD BUNCH, RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY, JUNIOR BONNER, and BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA!