Killing Season

Just a short comment for all the people complaining about the history facts.

There wasn't a Serbian Army? true that.. but there where: Arkanovi Tigrovi (Srpska dobrovoljacka garda), Knindze, Crvene beretke, Skorpioni, Seseljevi dobrovoljci, Dusan silni, Beli orlovi (Seseljevci, Osvetnici, Cetnici), Srpski sokolovi, Siltovi and many many more.. and they where not Japanese or chineese or Canadian people. It is to hard to understand to foreign ppl and learn all of them.. so they can say just "serbian army", even officially it wasn't their name.

Please look at the big picture and do not stick to these 2 words.

Travolta's Serbian slang is not perfect but he is acting good. I am sure Serbian actors don't speak perfect English to.

If is a movie. Not the greatest one but still a movie and no one said it is based on a true story.

So now i am sorry that i did not read the reviews first. The movie is a disappointment. I did not liked Travolta accent and look, this is not like an Serbian soldiers look like, not at all, you could tell it from 5 blocks away that this guy is American, anyway, if you wanna break your TV or laptop or you wanna beat the guy in the movie theater (you know, the guy at the ticketing) you are my guest to watch this movie.

And what can i say about the story... it is a little bit cheap.

The final act, yeah, it was like: "this is a beginning of a beautiful friendship"

Yeah, nice pictures in the nature, but hey, they sold me a movie not a postcard!

And here comes another one from Hollywood. I ll be short because its mine first review.

Plot mistake - "one American and one Serbian" OK lets see about this - on poster there are 2 guys,main actors. So probably plot is about them,because Deniro's name is American i presume that Travolta is acting that Serb guy. So lets get a little attention on that EMIL KOVAČ As far as i remember Emil is so common Muslim name and Kovač is also more commoner Croatian surname. Where the heck do you see Serbian there. The more funnier thing is that this is movie about Bosnian war LOL

Like some croatio-bosnian will fight for Serbs ,yea right.

I am aware that Hollywood is not History channel,but come on...get some facts at least for maincharacter names.

I was expecting to despise this movie. I only watched it because I was in the mood to see a bad De Niro movie, so the one where he's opposite Travolta playing a Serbian seemed to fit the criteria perfectly. But I was actually on board for the first 15 or so minutes of Killing Season. De Niro's character is off in a cabin isolated from his family and still recovering from the effects the Bosnian war had on him however many years ago, and Travolta's character is out for vengeance because he was left for dead in the same war on the opposing side. It's a simple enough premise. And there's one interesting scene where De Niro and Travolta are drinking and sharing war stories where you actually feel some tension but mutual respect building between them. Kind of like Pacino and De Niro in Heat (a blasphemous comparison but it's the first thing that came to mind). Anyway, I wanted more of that.

But as soon as that's over, the movie turns into a cat-and-mouse game between the two of them that consists of one of them getting captured and tortured, then they somehow escape and the chase continues until the other guy gets captured and tortured, then they somehow escape and the cycle continues. It's just dumb and predictable. And let's talk about the accents for a minute. Travolta doesn't even have a bad accent. Mind you I don't know how authentic of a Serbian accent it is, but the accent itself is convincing enough. The problem is that he uses the same intonation for everything he says. At one point he's literally shot in the f*cking face and the next minute he's talking in exactly the same tone as before. And De Niro does this southern accent that drifts in and out, and you can tell he's just there for a paycheck because he's not even trying to pull it off convincingly. Hell it was more believable in Machete. And the special effects, holy god they're awful. They'll randomly cut to a close up of a wound and it just looks terrible. It's gratuitous, and I don't mind gratuity all that much but when you can clearly tell something is CGI, there's no excuse for that to make it in the final cut. It's unnecessary, it looks like crap, get it out of there.

So yeah, I ended up disliking the movie but not for the reasons I was expecting. Travolta's accent wasn't the worst part of the movie like I thought it'd be. The story was quite interesting but it gets resolved in the most half-assed way, like there's absolutely no pathos when there so easily could have been seeing as how it's about two opposing war vets encountering each other after all this time. I mean, it's not a terrible movie. It really isn't. De Niro has had much worse, so has Travolta. But there are glimpses of potential all over this movie that get squandered in the dumbest possible ways, and that itself makes Killing Season a frustrating watch.

For starters, the movie gets absolutely everything wrong about events of the Bosnian war, but since such ignorance is expected from Hollywood, there is no reason to hold it against this particular title.

The premise of the movie is good, the basic story is decent, but the script could have been better written, the two main characters' stories never get satisfyingly developed. If this was directed by John McTiernan as originally planned, this would have been a great movie. Sadly, instead we got the guy who did Daredevil and he once again delivered a bland, uninspiring product. Acting is OK, Travolta did his best to hold a consistent accent (it was the wrong accent, but hey!) throughout the movie, while DeNiro looked more like he was only concerned with the paycheck.

All in all, the movie is not terrible, I guess it wouldn't kill you to watch it if you have nothing better to do for an hour and a half. The sad part is that this could have been a much, much better movie, perhaps even a classic.