“Killer Elite,” starring Jason Stratham, Robert De Niro, and Clive Owen, is an action film that does not have any good guys per se, but rather a variety of bad men who kill and even torture people for money.
The film opens with Stratham and De Niro executing a hit in Mexico. Something happens to cause Straham’s character to get out of the murder for hire business. He returns to Australia to build a farm. There he meets a woman, played by newcomer Yvonne Strahovski, who represents to him a chance of happiness and a normal life.
However, as they say, he tried to get out but they keep pulling him back in. “They” in this case is an Omani oil sheik who has taken De Niro’s character hostage and has given Stratham’s character an almost impossible assignment. He is to hunt down and kill three members of an elite death squad apparently embedded in the British SAS known as “the Feathermen.” These men killed three of the sheik’s sons and he not only wants them dead in return, but to have a video tape confession from each of them before they are sent to eternity.
Stratham carries out his assignment with alacrity. However he is being hunted by a British secret agent played by Clive Owen, who is every bit as ruthless as he is.
The thing that separates Stratham’s character (and to a certain extent De Niro’s) is that they seem to have a conscience. One gets the impression that, like Schwarzenegger’s character in “True Lies,” they have killed people without number, but they were all bad. But even putting down the worse of the worse can, one supposes, get to be trying on the soul. Stratham’s character is taking this one last job, not for the money, but to save his good friend and mentor, then to go home of Australia to the woman and, he hopes, a normal life.
Clive Owen’s character starts out doing what he does for Queen and Country, but even he gets corrupted in the end. There is a lot of money involved in the deaths of the three SAS assassins.
In the end, the movie proves the old adage that one cannot perform wet work without getting one’s hands dirty. We do not particularly like most of the characters, but we can hope they can find peace, one way or the other.
Source: Killer Elite, Yahoo Movies