raegan_butcher

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.

Based on a true story, believe it or not. Poor Josef Otto Klems. The man has problems. First seen cowering in a shell crater in 1918, he trades uniforms with a dead soldier (reasons remain unclear due to choppy and abrupt editing of the copy I viewed) Flash forward to Morocco in the early twenties. Otto Klems still has problems. Posted to some god awful desert hell hole, for one thing, and one of his superiors in the French Foreign Legion has designs on his booty (the man all but twirls his moustache to signify his evil intent). And if that isn't enough, the local Arab population isn't happy about the Spanish and the French putting boots on their precious desert hell-hole homeland, yadda yadda yadda. During a skirmish Sgt Klems manages to get captured by the locals but rather than get castrated (the usual punishment meted out by the heroic freedom fighters) he gets adopted. Becoming a sort of Lawrence of Arabia figure, he joins the natives in their fight against imperialism. He shows them modern weapons and tries to teach them tactics.

Hard to really judge this film. The version I viewed is chopped apart so bad that major chunks of exposition are missing, making it difficult to tell what is happening at times.The battle scenes pack a punch, however. The director has watched his Sergio Leone and he has seen the Wild Bunch, that is obvious. I am sure the full version is a better film. Peter Strauss looks like Viggo Mortensen. Based on a true story.

When asked about a particular cinematic floater in which he had appeared, Robert Mitchum replied, "They pay you for the bad ones too!" I am assuming that Val Kilmer has adopted that as his personal mantra to get him through this latest phase of his career. So far in the past week I have watched Kilmer in The Traveler, Streets of Blood and The Thaw and all of them are terrible.Not his fault, of course, he's just an actor. He is forced to deal with the scripts he is given.

The Traveler shows promise at the start, despite the derivative nature of the script and the stereotypes that take the place of characters. Once the supernatural huggery-muggery begins that promise rapidly begins to fade. The story makes no sense. At first it is hinted that Kilmer is the ghost of a wrongly killed man and he is going to enact revenge on the deserving occupants of the police station a la High Plains Drifter. If the script would have stayed with that angle it might have produced an interesting film,if only on the simplistic and preachy level of an old Twilight Zone. But the pernicious influence of M. Night Shyamalan on a whole generation of screenwriters forces the offending scripter to try a big twist at the end and--a common failing with gimmicks of this type--the big reveal is absurd and makes no sense. It also invalidates everything that came before in terms of logic or coherence. Ah well, better luck next time.