Rating: 
Summary: "Give me the gun. I'm gonna shoot him anyway."
Review: This was a good action movie with plenty of bullits and some martial arts mixed in. Caan gave a good performance. Two things kept me from giving this 5 stars. First a scene where Gig Young keeps a nervous Arthur Hill in the office doing paper work is moronic, and second, this movie screamed for a expanded role for a female character. The actress who played Caan's love interest was unattractive and void of talent. When you watch a movie like this you almost have to have some nudity and gratuitous sex to give you a reason to watch it a again and again. Oh well. What did work was the team of Caan, Burt Young, and Bo Hopkins...no one was Rambo but no one was an idiot either.
Rating: 
Summary: Skip This And Watch STRAW DOGS Again
Review: This wretched, utterly boring ninjas-on-the-loose fiasco has all the markings of a lowbudget mid-70's drive-in cheapie--ugly cinematography, incoherent plotting, large body count and comically inept slow motion action set pieces. There are plenty of movies from this era every bit as bad as THE KILLER ELITE but what makes this particular title stand out from the rest of the lowly bunch is that it was directed by Sam Peckinpah, one of America's greatest film artists. Peckinpah had managed to work a great deal of magic out of similarly banal thriller material a few years before in THE GETAWAY, thanks to his trademark rapid fire editing of some furiously violent suspense sequences; that film also benefited from a typically cool performance from the charismatic Steve McQueen. With ELITE, the director clearly didn't care at all and shot everything as quickly and perfunctorily as possible. He appears to have forgotten even his most rudimentary of cinematic skills, clunkily filming everything with a generic, TV-Movie obviousness. Peckinpah isn't helped at all by James Caan and Robert Duvall, two normally fine and powerful actors who, undoubtedly due to their vaguely defined characters, give frankly dull performances that completely fail to draw us into the proceedings. The end result is a film that is easily tied with CONVOY as Peckinpah's most infuriatingly awful effort; its truly sad seeing such a major talent waste himself away on such utterly substandard rubbish. Its a real shame that this film would inexplicably get a proper DVD release while absolute masterpieces like THE BALLAD OF CABLE HOGUE, BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA, CROSS OF IRON and PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID continue to languish in the vaults.
Rating:
Summary: Skip This And Watch STRAW DOGS Again
Review: This wretched, utterly boring ninjas-on-the-loose fiasco has all the markings of a lowbudget mid-70's drive-in cheapie--ugly cinematography, incoherent plotting, large body count and comically inept slow motion action set pieces. There are plenty of movies from this era every bit as bad as THE KILLER ELITE but what makes this particular title stand out from the rest of the lowly bunch is that it was directed by Sam Peckinpah, one of America's greatest film artists. Peckinpah had managed to work a great deal of magic out of similarly banal thriller material a few years before in THE GETAWAY, thanks to his trademark rapid fire editing of some furiously violent suspense sequences; that film also benefited from a typically cool performance from the charismatic Steve McQueen. With ELITE, the director clearly didn't care at all and shot everything as quickly and perfunctorily as possible. He appears to have forgotten even his most rudimentary of cinematic skills, clunkily filming everything with a generic, TV-Movie obviousness. Peckinpah isn't helped at all by James Caan and Robert Duvall, two normally fine and powerful actors who, undoubtedly due to their vaguely defined characters, give frankly dull performances that completely fail to draw us into the proceedings. The end result is a film that is easily tied with CONVOY as Peckinpah's most infuriatingly awful effort; its truly sad seeing such a major talent waste himself away on such utterly substandard rubbish. Its a real shame that this film would inexplicably get a proper DVD release while absolute masterpieces like THE BALLAD OF CABLE HOGUE, BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA, CROSS OF IRON and PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID continue to languish in the vaults.
Rating: 
Summary: Not bad at all
Review: Wooden acting, confused plot, and a really stupid mix of guns and ninjas at the end make this Peckinpah's worst film. Caan doesn't seem interested in his character at all and Duvall gets cut out of the movie after 10 minutes. I liked the idea of the two friends and the betrayel but the whole philosophical angle at the end came out of nowhere and didn't make much sense. Don't waste your time on this dated action flick.
Rating:
Summary: Worst Peckinpah Effort
Review: Wooden acting, confused plot, and a really stupid mix of guns and ninjas at the end make this Peckinpah's worst film. Caan doesn't seem interested in his character at all and Duvall gets cut out of the movie after 10 minutes. I liked the idea of the two friends and the betrayel but the whole philosophical angle at the end came out of nowhere and didn't make much sense. Don't waste your time on this dated action flick.
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