So where does Killer Elite fit into that category? Well, if you somehow didn't get the idea from the first paragraph, it's not in the "Good" pile. To be fair, it isn't De Niro's fault if only because he's really not in most of the movie - just at the beginning and near the end. Killer Elite sucks - it's a grade school version of an action movie. Over and over we're given needless scenes of exposition where characters say things like "As you all know, we're former SAS members, and since we are no longer SAS members we are bankers." Why are we subjected to this unnecessary information? My suspicion is that writer Matt Sherring didn't want any audience members to be confused during the film, so he overexplains everything and director Gary McKendry didn't bother to cut out the redundant (and embarrassing) extra dialogue.
Killer Elite is an unnecessarily complicated film, apparently based on Ranulph Fiennes' book The Feather Men, which is a memoir about Britain's Special Air Services' involvement in Oman and about hired killers or some crap. To be honest, if the book is anything like the movie, it doesn't surprise me that the British government denied everything that Fiennes claims happened. If the book is half as poorly written as the movie I'm amazed they acknowledged it exists at all. It is also a remake in name only (maybe) of Sam Peckinpah's The Killer Elite, which makes it similar to the servicable but also not-very-good The Mechanic, another Statham vehicle I watched begrudgingly.
The long and the short of it is that in 1980 and 81, Danny (Statham) and Hunter (De Niro) are hired killers who travel around the world doing dirty work that no one else wants. Danny kills some Mexican official in front of the guy's daughter and "quits," which we all know means he'll be back for one more job. Sure enough, a year later he is summoned from his new home in Australia by Agent (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), the man who handles these kills, to help Hunter. Hunter accepted a job for Sheikh Amr (Rodney Afif) to kill three SAS soldiers responsible for the death of his sons, but then he chickened out and is being held prisoner. Danny now has to kill the three soldiers to save Hunter, so with his team - Davies (Blade Trinity's Dominic Purcell) and Meier (Aden Young) - he sets out to do the impossible and murder three special forces badasses.
If that were the movie, okay, I'd be interested. But then, because that isn't enough movie, the SAS guys are all friends of Spike (Owen), who works with the shady SAS guys who are now bankers. They want him to keep a lid on things, so now we have an American Gangster like dual story except that neither protagonist is really that good of a person and they both enjoy beating the shit out of people. Despite an attempt to develop a love story between Danny and Australian native Anne (played by Chuck's Yvonne Strahovski) and Spike's wife who is in literally one scene and is never heard from again (couldn't find her name), we never really care about either character.
The fight scenes are edited in the usual blur of motion, shaky cam style that prevents audiences from being able to follow anything that's happening, so at least there are some decent chase scenes (on car and on foot) to balance that out. Dominic Purcell is pretty funny as Davies, a character so bad at impersonating an SAS veteran that other SAS vets immediately see through his ruse. Considering how unimpressed I was with his Drake in Blade Trinity, I felt it was worth pointing out that he's the highlight in an otherwise stupid movie. Robert De Niro is not bad, but he doesn't really make much of an impression - Hunter mostly walks around and threatens people but doesn't kill them, even when he should. Statham and Owen do the best they can with basically useless dialogue.
Half the time, you wouldn't know the film takes place in the 80s because Killer Elite is also full of sloppy anachronisms - for example, if you have a title card that says "The Year is 1980" and then one that says "One Year Later," you cannot use a newspaper obituary that claims the SAS member killed after the second title card died in 1980. You also cannot use modern earphones, motorcycle helmets, or new $100 bills in your period film. It's REALLY lazy and brings further into question the flimsy logic the film hopes to pass by with. Why do Jason Statham and Clive Owen continue fighting when the MFWIC (which stands for "Mother Fucker What's In Charge," one of the arguably best lines in the film) reveals that he's actually the bad guy both of them are fighting? Why does the film even suggest that Spike might still come after Danny even though there's NO good reason to keep this going?
Look, I understand that on some primitive level this film exists because some stoned asshole said "what would happen if Crank fought Shoot 'Em Up?" I get that, but the end result is convoluted and feels twice as long as it actually is. I really stopped caring after Danny killed the third SAS guy, and that's maybe the halfway point on Killer Elite. By the time Clive Owen is in Sheikh Amr's palace / house and delivering photos of a fourth SAS soldier, I'd tuned out. I'll tolerate action movies that try too hard to a point, but Killer Elite can't decide whether to be overachieving or lazy, so it's both. And it sucks.
* It's actually two dollars now, but that doesn't have the same ring to it that "dollar fifty" does when spoken, so let's keep it as it was.
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