MOVIE REVUE: Killer Elite, Not The Cream of the Crop

“Killing is easy. Living with it is the hard part,” says Danny Bryce, Jason Statham’s character in Killer Elite.

Though this nugget of wisdom is not imparted until well into the second half of the film, it’s a pretty good meter of what to expect in Gary McKendry’s  adaptation of Sir Ranulph Fiennes controversial ‘true adventure’ book The Feather Men. Published in 1991, the book originally claimed to be an account of an assassination plot against the British military officers allegedly responsible for killing the sons of an Omani sheikh during Britain’s unofficial campaign in the Middle East. Since then its factual accuracy has been picked to the bone and is now viewed predominantly as a work of fiction.

MOVIE REVUE: Straw Dogs Revisits the Darker Side of Human Nature

A Straw Dog – highly regarded, but when no longer need, discarded.

In 1971, Sam Peckinpah’s psychological thriller Straw Dogs  created a ripple in a generation of filmgoers  with  its  unprecedented depiction  of  human brutality. Censors struggled with an appropriate rating in England where it was filmed and initially released, branding it with an 18 + due to its graphic rendering of a sexual assault. The film was then trimmed for its release in the United States to satisfy the MPAAs requirements for an R rating and subsequently put through twenty years of re-edits that resulted in three different cuts, most recently (and ironically) in its original, unrated form.