Supposedly based on a true story, director Gary McKendry’s  “Killer Elite” boasts a terrific premise. After a close call involving a child, Danny (Jason Statham) decides that it’s time to get out of the elite assassin-for-hire business. After a year of bliss in the wilds of Australia with a lovely blond lovely and innocent enough to save any man’s soul , Danny’s friend and mentor, Hunter (Robert De Niro), is kidnapped, and the ransom is a job. An Omani sheik promises to execute Hunter unless Danny avenges the death of the sheik’s three sons at the hands of a trio of British SAS officers. The sheik not only wants the three deadly and highly-skilled SAS agents killed, he wants them to confess to their crimes on tape. In exchange, Hunter will be freed, carrying six million in cash as a bonus.

Danny’s also up against the clock. He has to finish the job before the aged and ailing sheik dies, so he quickly assembles a team of fellow mercenaries to track down the three men and figure out a way to not only get them to confess but also to make their deaths look like an accident. The hitch in the plan is Spike Logan (Clive Owen), the leader of a secret organization of  former SAS-types who have banded together to protect themselves from outside forces… such as Danny.

The set-up is solid; in fact, it’s inspired — not only in its simplicity but in making the audience understand immediately both the stakes and how difficult the mission will be. The problem is the execution, which is nowhere near as exciting or clever as you anticipate. The killing of these SAS agents is absurdly easy, as is extracting their confessions. Once the second act kicks in, you sit back expecting the script to take us into the fascinating details of how assassins who work at the highest level operate. Unfortunately, nothing that follows even rises to the level of a standard “Mission: Impossible” episode.

De Niro looks good in the role of a grizzled mercenary unwilling to give into age, but he’s barely in the movie. Statham, a genuinely charismatic action star who needs to pick better scripts, is perfectly capable of carrying a film on his own, but all he’s given here is a choppy plot disguised as an international thriller, plus a few unexciting action sequences filmed with the shaky-cam and edited for maximum confusion.

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A man is tied to a chair. He’s being brutally interrogated. But he’s a man who takes shit from no one. And so—you have to see this—he rises up against his tormenters and in a martial-artsy fury takes them out. And then—you really have to see this—he goes crashing through a plate glass window, still tied to the chair, and plummets a good long way down to…

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Yes, this is a Jason Statham movie. Which is not a bad thing. Statham, unusually among action stars, has a warm, contemplative charm. And as an actual athlete, his furious doings are an inspiration to legions of doughy moviegoers around the world.

No, the regrettable thing about this picture is most of the rest of it, which is undone by a lack of narrative clarity and thus momentum. Statham plays Danny, a retired mercenary living in bucolic tranquility in the Australian outback, tended by his girlfriend (the uncommonly fetching Yvonne Strahovski). One day Danny receives a message from Oman, with plane tickets attached. It seems that a fellow mercenary named Hunter (Robert De Niro)—Danny’s mentor in international mayhem—is being held prisoner, and will be killed unless Danny uses those plane tickets.

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It must be difficult to adapt a nonfiction book into a movie. A good screenwriter would likely try to capture all of the story’s important details while ensuring that all of the real-life figures were portrayed accurately. If that sounds like a difficult task, it must be even more treacherous to adapt a book that some believe people is a true story and others believe is absolute nonsense. That was the assignment given to Gary McKendry and Matt Sherring, who wrote the screenplay for the new film, “Killer Elite.” I recently conducted a phone interview with McKendry, who also directed the film, about his new movie and the story behind it.

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The film focuses on a British mercenary named Danny (Jason Stathham), who retires early in the story. His former partner, Hunter (Robert De Niro), continues to take assignments while Danny lives a quiet life in Australia. However, a year later, Danny discovers that Hunter has been kidnapped. The hostage-taker is a sheik who wants Danny to avenge the death of his three sons who were killed by members of the British Special Air Service (SAS). The sheik has two specific requests: he wants videotapes of the soldiers confessing to the murders and he wants their deaths to look like accidents.

The film is based on “The Feather Men,” a book written by Ranulph Fiennes. The title refers to a group of individuals who work behind the scenes in England and organize assassinations and complete dirty work that the government doesn’t want to be involved in. When the book was released, the British government adamantly denied the story while Fiennes insisted on its veracity.

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Via FSR:

Killer Elite begins by stressing that what on the surface appeared to be little more than a run-of-the-mill Jason Statham-Clive Owen action flick is in fact a serious evocation of the chaotic geopolitical scene circa 1980, and based on a true story. Naively, I felt a twinge of eager anticipation. Could this actually be a serious globe-trotting thriller, a chance for Statham to showcase some dramatic range?

Not so much. 

Gary McKendry’s movie, based on the novel The Feather Men by Sir Ranulph Fiennes, is in fact only dubiously based on fact at all (there’s been an ongoing controversy over its claim to be a “true adventure” since its publication in 1991).

Beyond that, the flick is basically the full-throttle machismo fest that’s the natural outcome when Statham and Owen get top billing on the same film, with Robert De Niro checking in for good measure. There’s butt-kicking in Oman, France and England, with hilariously idyllic Australian fantasies interspersed throughout. The picture entertains, at times legitimately and at others in a cheesy, ’80s action sort of way. The tough-as-nails stars, however, imbue the narrative with more credibility than would have Schwarzenegger or Stallone.

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Near the beginning of “The Mechanic,” a man dives into his indoor pool and starts swimming. Armed guards surround the man’s home. There are even people working nearby the pool who watch the man swim. It doesn’t matter. After spotting something underwater, the swimmer is attacked by a hired assassin who had infiltrated the man’s fortress.  The assassin clearly knows how to get the job done. He’s had plenty of practice learning the skills that have made him a sought-after “mechanic.”

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According to this story,  a “mechanic” is a paid assassin and Arthur Bishop (Jason Statham) is a great one. Aside from his work in the pool, Bishop has handled plenty of tough assignments. “Pulling a trigger is easy,” Bishop notes calmly near the beginning of the story. He’s spent much of his life finding ways to get to his “marks” and killing whoever his boss asks him to.  

The newest target Bishop is given is an old friend and a fellow assassin named Harry (Donald Sutherland). Bishop is hesitant about the assignment and meets with his boss to determine why Harry is being targeted. Harry has betrayed the team, Bishop is told. After Bishop decides whether or not to accept the assignment,  Harry’s son Steve (Ben Foster) approaches him and asks him about his work. Steve wants to enter the family business. Bishop reluctantly accepts him as an apprentice and Steve quickly becomes comfortable with the job. (more…)

Hollywood’s romanticized assassins are artists, and their hands, knives, guns are their paintbrushes. Murder is their canvas. “The Mechanic” details the romanticized world of assassin “firms with brutal clarity. In this world of one-use cell phones and “jobs” stashed in manila envelopes, Arthur (Jason Statham) is a master “mechanic,” a fixer whose perfect hits mirror the immaculate retro life he leads, complete with a hobby classic he’s fixing in the garage and vinyl Shubert on the stereo, which he cleans before every play. This life is disrupted when Steve (Ben Foster), the washed-up, violently rebellious son of Arthur’s late mentor, comes to him for training. When Arthur’s firm turns on him, he and protégé Steve take the battle to the firm’s door. It’s explosive, just like the trailer promises. 

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Writers Richard Wenk and Lewis John Carlino have written dynamic characters into a fun, moderately suspenseful action-packed assassin movie. Arthur’s a likable killer who does his job well. His only weakness is a hooker girlfriend. Aside from that, his hidden home in the New Orleans bayou sports a classic American elegance, his slice of the American Dream. But it’s a little cliché. Fixing cars is a go-to movie hobby, and generally not inventive. 

Assassins are all the same, Wenk and Carlino seem to say. One of Arthur’s targets is a cautious, clean mountain of a man who works for a rival firm. The man enjoys painting, lives in a spotless mansion in New Orleans and also drives a luxury car. The target’s one flaw is also sexual – it’s just a bit more devious than Arthur’s. 

This makes Foster’s Steve the most interesting character in the story. He’s a down-and-out bare-knuckles kid who smokes and drinks incessantly and hates rules. He’s not this film’s typical assassin. When Arthur tells him to get lost, Steve won’t take no for an answer. And when Arthur tells him to make his first kill a clean one, he ignores the command, preferring an intense bloody mess to show he’s just as tough as his teacher. But for all his stupidity and arrogance, Steve’s a real person – just one you don’t want to cross.  (more…)

There’s much to like about “The Expendables,” especially the simple straight-forward plot, all the B-movie mayhem you could possibly ask for, and two unapologetic hours of masculinity – which may be two hours more than we’ve seen in all of the last decade put together.  These boys smoke cigars, drink beer while piloting airplanes, and return us to those glorious pre-Oprah days when stoicism was still a virtue and real men didn’t gush about their inner-emotional lives like 13 year-old girls drunk on Dr. Pepper at a slumber party.  There are also things to dislike, especially that evil shaky-cam which has done more to ruin a good time at the movies than liberal speechifying.   John Sturges knew what a tri-pod was. Does anyone really think they can improve on Sturges? 

Sylverster Stallone’s glorious throwback to the brawny 80s is also about something, and it’s not Bourne-ian self-discovery. It’s about something that actually matters. And in this age of nihilism when believing in anything bigger than self is considered old-fashioned, unsophisticated and naïve, that’s both refreshing and important.  Mickey Rourke, who has a small but showy supporting role as the proprietor of the tattoo parlor that serves as the Expendables’ hangout, explains it with a single word. I won’t spoil anything, but without this scene, this important turning point, “The Expendables” wouldn’t be half the movie it is. 

Stallone plays Barney Ross (probably not his real name), the leader of a band of American mercenaries who, along with Christmas (Jason Statham), Gunner (Dolph Lundgren), Yang (Jet Li), Toll (Randy Couture), and Caesar (Terry Crews), is willing to go most anywhere and kill most any bad guy for a price. The story opens with a well-crafted action sequence involving Somalia pirates that not only establishes how deadly competent our guys are, but also that they’re not cold-blooded killers.  These are men with a moral code and one of their own breaking that code will be the root cause of deadly complications and a couple over the top action sequences to come.  (more…)

He is a man with a gun. He is a killer, a slayer. Patient and gentle as he is, he is a slayer. Self-effacing, self-forgetting, still he is a killer. . . All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted. — D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923)

Every once in awhile an action film comes along that revives. That proves that — no matter how strong the political correctness of an age, no matter how pale and pathetic its notions of masculinity, no matter how much Ritalin is force-fed to little boys, no matter how many toy guns, xylophone mallets, and Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots get banned from stores and playgrounds — there are certain aspects of the male soul that are inviolate, and certain primal yearnings that are evergreen. Taken (2008) is one of those films, and its release last week on DVD and Blu-ray should be heralded by lovers of all things red-blooded, hairy-chested, and morally sound.

When this movie appeared in the doldrums of Hollywood’s off-season, it was expected to die a quick death in a marketplace filled with audiences either too sophisticated or too sophomoric to respond. Modern theatergoers, the theory goes, increasingly want their “heroes” to be either brooding Abercrombie & Fitch nymphets like Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon, feckless stumblebums like Ben Stiller and Paul Blart: Mall Cop’s Kevin James, quirky class cut-ups like Robert Downey Jr. and Johnny Depp, or silly video-game tough guys like Jason Statham, Vin Diesel, and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. When an actor does put some honest testosterone in his performance — Daniel Craig in Munich (2005), Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino (2008) — it’s inevitably to make a much larger point about violence breeding only more violence, all of it equally reprehensible, a product of way too many pesky males wreaking havoc in primitive bursts of knuckle-dragging temper. (more…)

In my Final Weekend Tracking column posted on Wednesday, I predicted that X-Men Origins: Wolverine (Fox) would reach $92M on opening weekend, despite soft reviews (now only 38% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes). My first fearless forecast of the 2009 summer blockbuster season appears to be close to dead-on (missed by only 5%).

Star-turned-producer Hugh Jackman has scored his second-biggest opening ever and, easily, his biggest as a solo star. Wolverine has mauled the competition with a massive $34.75M opening day (including $5M or so in Thursday midnight sales). That could translate to a 3-day of $86.8M, getting Hollywood’s most lucrative season off to a spectacular start.

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The great thing about a sequel is that it has a built-in audience. The problem with sequels is that, as the numbers after the title go up, so does the production budget. Very hard to know for sure, but sources have told me that the production budget for X-Men was in the $75M range. X-2: X-Men United may have had a budget of about $110M, while the cost of X-Men: The Last Stand was, in all likelihood, as much as $210M. Why doesn’t it make sense to just churn out X-Men 4?

Look at these numbers.

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Recording superstar Beyonce Knowles is building a bankable resume for herself as an actress with Sony Screen Gems’ Obsessed as the latest title burnishing her resume. Co-starring the excellent Idris Elba (The Wire), this low budget, PG-13 genre pic has scored a far-above-expectations $11M on Friday, and it will likely reach $27.5M for the weekend. That is the best opening yet for the former Destiny’s Child lead vocalist as an above-the-title star, topping 2003’s The Fighting Temptations and Cadillac Records from late 2008.

Beyonce does battle with the sexy Ali Larter (HEROES) in OBSESSED

OPENINGS FOR BEYONCE MOVIES
1. Austin Powers: Goldmember – $70.3M opening
2. Obsessed – $27.5M opening (projected)
3. Pink Panther (2006) – $20.2M opening
4. Dreamgirls – $14.1M wide break (after a platform start)
5. The Fighting Temptations – $11.7M opening
6. Cadillac Records – $3.4M opening

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The final weekend of April has never been Hollywood’s favorite release date. In fact, it is generally considered to be among the worst release dates on the calendar. Whatever opens on the final weekend of April gets absolutely crushed by the official start of the summer blockbuster season on the first weekend of May.

The 4 new wide releases and 1 major specialty release set to debut this weekend will face an onslaught of mega-hits over the next month. How can Obsessed (Sony), Earth (Disney), The Soloist, (Dreamworks/Paramount), Fighting (Rogue) and The Informers (Senator) possibly find an audience with X-Men Origins: Wolverine (Fox) and Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (Warner Bros) arriving next weekend followed by, in successive weeks, Star Trek (Paramount), Angels & Demons (Sony), the combo of Night at the Museum 2 (Fox) and Terminator: Salvation (Fox) and Disney/Pixar’s Up?

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