Wonderful character development!

It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

Boring, over-political, tech fuzed mess

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

The Killer Elite 1975 by all accounts, a legendary fiasco of a production, the director drunk most of the time and everyone else snow blind. This is the film where (allegedly) a crew member introduced Sam Peckinpah to cocaine, which didn't seem to help "Bloody Sam's" moody irascibility. James Caan and Robert Duvall give bizarre performances, manic and weird (cocaine is a hell of a drug) and even Burt Young looks glassy-eyed and ringy. The resurrection of the body is the theme. Caan's collapse in a restaurant is briskly cut for maximum shame and helplessness, followed by "Cleft chins and true hearts are out." Then it is mid-70s martial arts on the road to rehabilitation and revenge. After reinstatement, Caan announces, "I'm gonna need some things." and Arthur Hiller says, "Get em," and hands over a huge wad of cash. Burt Young and Bo Hopkins have Caan's back: "One is retired, the other is crazy." Hopkins makes his first appearance shooting skeet with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background, "The Poet of Manic Depressives" with his shy smile and aw shucks charm, surely the stand-in for Peckinpah: "I didn't think your company would hire me." Mako gets to sword fight at the end. Absurd. The surprise is how watchable it is.

There seems to be no point to the story of this fictional division of the CIA, supposedly meant to crack open plots against the United States and other allies. The film starts off promising with two of the agents (James Caan and Robert Duvall) going about their daily routines until Duvall begins to tease Caan about his latest sexual conquest over the fact that she might be diseased. Then, when they go on duty, Duvall suddenly kills the man they are guarding (veteran actor Helmut Dantine) and shoots Caan violently simply to "retire" him. The film then has an interesting sequence showing Caan's recovery, but goes down hill from there as Caan gets involved with a Japanese version of the same agency while he tracks Duvall down for revenge. Predictably, there are traitors among his colleagues, and after lots of violence and encounters with the most unpleasant characters, the film reaches its wimpy conclusion. Caan and Duvall, both hot after "The Godfather", seemed logical choices for re-teaming, but the gratuitous violence and ugliness of the story makes this a weak follow-up. The power of "The Godfather" was its romantic, almost operatic like tragedy, but this is simply nothing but a disturbing view of how films had turned to sordidness by the mid 1970's. Director Sam Peckinpah, whose films are over-run with violence, needed a script with more story and less nastiness.

Killer Elite, The (1975) ** (out of 4) Disappointing thriller from Sam Peckinpah has much of the director's style but very little else. In the film, Mike (James Caan) and George (Robert Duvall) are friends working for the same secret group of spies. While on a mission George decides to take a pay-out so he shoots the person they're supposed to be guarding and he also shoots Mike putting him out of commission. As you'd expect, it doesn't take too long for both men to be facing each other down again. THE KILLER ELITE is a pretty much forgotten film by the director and it's easy to see why as there's very little entertainment to be had here. The most disappointing thing is that the director was given a pretty strong cast to work with but in the end the story is just too weak and moves way too slow to be very entertaining. I will say that the film starts off at a pretty good pace with the introduction of the two lead characters followed by a hilarious joke involving Mike going to bed with a certain woman and George "knowing" something about her. The big double-cross was also stylishly done and of course it features a head being shot up in that Peckinpah slow-motion that you'd expect. From this point on the movie just tries to be too smart for its own good as there are several double-crosses that take place but after a while you just really grow tired of how ridiculous the film is getting so you just tune out and wait for the ending. Again, if you're a Peckinpah junkie then you'll be happy to know that there are several bits from the director including all the slow-motion action scenes. Each time someone dies they do it in slow motion and there's no doubt that the director, even at this stage of his career, knew how to stage an action scene. Both Caan and Duvall are in fine form and their chemistry together makes one wish that they were together more often. The before mentioned joke in the car works perfectly as the actors really make you seem as they're friends. The supporting cast includes familiar faces like Mako, Bo Hopkins, Arthur Hill, Burt Young and Gig Young. THE KILLER ELITE runs just over two-hours and sadly most of this time the viewer is just bored and wishing it would end. There simply aren't enough good moments to make the film worth viewing to anyone outside those Peckinpah fans.

Easygoing freelance special agent Mike Locken (an excellent and engaging performance by James Caan) gets severely wounded in both his knee and elbow after being double-crossed by his tough and shifty longtime friend and partner George Hansen (a typically fine Robert Duvall). After a long and painful recovery, Locken gets a gig to protect noble Asian politician Yuen Chung (well played by Mako) and a prime opportunity to exact revenge on Hansen. Director Sam Peckinpah, working from an edgy and convoluted script by Marc Norman and Stirling Silliphant, astutely captures a distinctly 70's post-Watergate atmosphere of dread, paranoia, and moral ambiguity while exploring his usual themes of ethics, friendship, loyalty, and betrayal. Peckinpah stages several bang-up action set pieces with his customary stylistic flair: a failed hit at an airport, a wild shoot-out and subsequent car chase on the streets of San Francisco, and the exciting climax at an empty ships' graveyard. Cann and Duvall both do sterling work in the lead roles; they receive able support from Arthur Hill as the duplicitous Cap Collins, Bo Hopkins as nutty live-wire gunman Jerome Miller, Gig Young as the gloomy Lawrence Weyburn, Burt Young as cynical cab driver Mac, and the lovely Tiana as Chung's feisty daughter Tommie. Kate Heflin brings a sweet and appealing warmth to her part as Locken's helpful and sympathetic nurse girlfriend Amy. Moreover, this picture pushes the PG rating as far as it can go: the starling moments of ferocious violence are pretty brutal and grisly and we even get a decent smidgen of tasty gratuitous female nudity (look fast for ubiquitous soft-core starlet Ushi Digard in a cool uncredited bit). Philip H. Lathrop's handsome widescreen cinematography makes neat occasional use of graceful fades and dissolves. Jerry Fielding provides an effectively varied and shivery score. While not one of Peckinpah's best-ever movies (the film suffers from an overlong running time and the narrative meanders quite a bit), it's still worth seeing for fans of Bloody Sam just the same.