Review by C.J. Bunce
Fans of Jason Statham movies know what they are going to get: plenty of action and Statham’s take-no-prisoners attitude. You may have first noticed his cool and cocky bravado under director John Carpenter in Ghosts of Mars, but he would become synonymous with three Transporter movies beginning in 2002. He’s co-starred in The Fast and the Furious, The Expendables, and The Meg franchises, starred in a dozen other single-word action flicks, including Parker, Collateral, Cellular, Revolver, Snatch, Crank, Safe, and Redemption, with The Beekeeper, A Working Man, and Fast X his latest projects. His best acting can be found in two of the best heist movies of all time with 2003’s The Italian Job, followed by 2008’s The Bank Job. What you may have missed is his top billing with the likes of Robert De Niro and Clive Owen in the 2011 action thriller Killer Elite. And it has Yvonne Strahovski, Ben Mendelsohn, and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje. It’s a re-watched and popular enough movie that it’s streaming right now on Hulu, Peacock, Disney, Prime Video, Pluto, Roku, Tubi, and CW.
The first thing to know is that the marketing proclaims the events in the film were based on a true story. The movie is an adaptation of the book The Feather Men by Sir Ranulph Fiennes. You could dig into the history of why the events in that book have been challenged (some of the connections are too good to be real), or just enjoy the movie as another Statham action movie. Statham plays Danny Bryce, an assassin for hire in 1980, whose mentor, called Hunter, is played by De Niro. During a hit Danny kills a man in front of his kid, which prompts Danny to leave the killing business for good and relocate to Australia. But older hitman Hunter needs the money to support his lifestyle and kids.
Flash forward to a year later and Danny is blackmailed to take over a series of three assassinations that Hunter got looped into. It turns out a deposed king in a small part of Oman lost three sons in battle during the Dhofar Rebellion, and he hired Hunter to eliminate the three men identified as the killers–all for a cool $3 million. Hunter didn’t fulfill the mission so he’s being held hostage until the job is done. But was Hunter really hired, or did Hunter collude with the father just to get the younger and sharper Danny to complete the job? Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje plyas the intermediary coaxing Danny into the deal. Statham and De Niro bring enough believability into this unlikely scenario to keep viewers along for the entire film to find out.
Danny is devoted to his history with Hunter so he hires two men, Davies and Meier, to strategize the mission. Davies is a fantastic personality, exactly what you’d expect from a mercenary who kills people for living. He’s played by Dominic Purcell of Arrow-verse fame. Meier is more reserved, providing more of the strategy and planning, played by Aden Young. Viewers get to know them long enough to actually like this team, despite the fact they are all killing for money. But one by one they start picking off the kill list.
Yvonne Strahovsky is the only actress of any note in this story, as Danny’s girlfriend Anne, and even when she’s on screen it’s secondary to anything in the story. Still, she’s a good pairing for Danny. Ben Mendelsohn is one of the players in the twisty politics of the story.
Which brings us to Clive Owen, a young member of a sort of star chamber–power brokers with their own agenda, who call themselves the Feather Men. Owen is trying to track down Danny & Co. and get them to stop killing, breaking the law, etc. It’s a different kind of role for the actor, and it works. Somehow it all falls together to create some intrigue.
Not just another action movie, with a good re-creation of the early 1980s, and Statham fans will especially want to check it out. Killer Elite is streaming now, practically everywhere.
