When THE KILLER ELITE started, immediately after the snazzy and even witty title sequence by Burke Mattson, I thought for a while I wouldn’t even make it through the thing. James Caan and Robert Duvall’s early scenes have an improv, overlapping quality, not in itself a terrible thing, but they seem awfully self-satisfied about how wackily naturalistic they’re being (they seem high, in fact), plus Peckinpah’s shooting and Tony de Zarraga and Monte Hellman’s cutting seem designed to keep us at a distance from the characters, everything is far away and fragmented, and the characters we’re evidently meant to warm to just seem obnoxious.
Gradually bits of the film start to feel like they’ve received the attentions of a screenwriter or three, Peckinpah seems to get his heart started, and some trace of sympathy for Caan is generated. He has to get shot multiple times for this to happen, which may give you a sense of what a jerk he is to begin with.
The montage-like sequences showing his surgery and physiotherapy after having elbow and knee shattered by bullets are really good — barely any dialogue, the mumbly throwaway improv style starts to work, and it’s nice to see Peckinpah applying his fragmented style to something other than killing.
Gig Young looks drunk, and probably was.
When, surprisingly late in the action, Caan gets a Dangerous Mission, he brings in a couple of buddies, and the acting side of the film becomes a lot more engaging, because his team is Burt Young — a weird actor, pop-eyed and bulbous, who always seems completely real even though it’s doubtful any of us has ever seen anything like him in reality — and Bo Hopkins, a Peckinpah favourite, playing “the patron saint of manic-depressives,” a self-medicating maverick killer inexplicably entrusted by Caan with key duties. 
Since the third act moral message of THE WILD BUNCH is “You never leave a man behind” it always struck me as odd that in the first act, the Bunch leaves Bo Hopkins as Crazy Lee behind, guarding the hostages, without a backward glance. Maybe it’s a deliberate attempt to undercut the mythologising, or maybe Walon Green forgot. It is also strange that my dear mother finds Hopkins so adorable and hilarious in his one sequence of that film, as he forces the hostages to sing “Shall We Gather at the River.” But then, Richard Widmark is her favourite actor.
Funny bit, when Caan is looking for some way of taking out a nosy cop, and asks what kind of kit Hopkins has. He’s told plastique, pistols, garrotting wire. “No, no, non-lethal.”
“Everything’s lethal,” shrugs Hopkins. The feeling is that this man could kill you with a wafer biscuit or a pair of pop socks.
It’s a trashy film with a few grace notes — an anti-CIA post-Watergate thriller could be, as Burt Y says, “Nice and necessary,” but not when it’s an overblown bloodbath celebrating hand-to-hand mayhem. Even Hellman’s fancy cutting can’t make the tubby Burt hurling ninjas off a battleship look convincing. 
Don Siegel’s memoir describes the creation of DIRTY HARRY’s final draft: they spread all the previous drafts over the office floor and picked the bits they all liked. TKE feels exactly like that, but you have to factor in egotistic actors making up their own lines, and the director being an alcoholic and cocaine fiend, and the extreme likelihood of clashes with the producers playing a part in the “process.” Plus maybe Heller’s experimental approach to the mountains of footage, which gives us the best moments, doesn’t lean towards cohesion. I swear one scene fades out with Caan trying out different line readings.
Whoever cut the trailer thinks that Mako is a girl.
THE KILLER ELITE stars Sonny Corleone; Tom Hagen; Dr. Jeremy Stone; Crazy Lee; Admiral Yamamoto; Bed Bug Eddie; Quill; Marc Antony; Jimmy Chan; and SuperSoul.
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