Entertainment

Gruff assassins’ surprisingly thrilling killings

‘Killer Elite” is a snarly Euro-thriller with crust under its fingernails and bad breath. It doesn’t care if you like it, which is why I kind of do.

Though thickly paved with stunts, the film is pleasingly and plausibly complicated, much more than you’d expect, considering the way it expresses itself, with much talk like “This all f – – king ends today,” “Killing’s easy — living with it’s the hard part” and (really, guys?) “Who are you? Who do you work for?”

In 1980, Danny (Jason Statham) is a freelance hit man who gets roped into One. Last. Job. While he’s busy cuddling his girlfriend, he hears his partner (Robert De Niro, who, as he has been doing for nearly 20 years, didn’t seem to work very hard on his character) has been kidnapped by an exiled sheik from Oman who wants revenge against the British soldiers who killed his sons in an oil war. When Danny kills the soldiers, he’ll get his old friend back.

He’s disgusted by the mission but accepts, offering to split the $6 million bounty entirely among his mangy partners (Dominic Purcell and Aden Young). Thanks to an incident in Mexico in which he nearly killed a helpless child, Danny has turned against his old profession, and he hates the idea of innocent people getting killed.

His opposite number, Spike (played by a fully engaged Clive Owen and the year’s Best Supporting Mustache), works for a shadowy group of businessmen and bankers (we know this because one of them says, “We’re businessmen and bankers”) who are also ex-SAS men — British special forces.

Spike is the guy you call when your former comrades in arms start dying in mysterious “accidents.” (It’s a condition of the sheik who hires Danny that all of the murders look accidental, just in case he wants to do an oil deal with the UK government.)

The film (which is unrelated to the 1975 Sam Peckinpah effort “The Killer Elite”) is based on an allegedly nonfiction book by celebrity adventurer Sir Ranulph Fiennes. I don’t necessarily believe that any of this really happened — Sir R. being a bit of a blustery old Evelyn Waugh/Monty Python character — but Fiennes did serve with British forces in Oman, and for a thriller the story is fairly near-fetched.

It also moves speedily, and not in the shallow sense of jittery editing. Allow your attention to wander, and you may never regain your footing as director Gary McKendry sprints from Mexico to Australia to Oman to the UK and Paris. It also doesn’t waste time on political correctness (the girlfriend, who I think is the only woman with any dialogue, is just the girlfriend, not a girlfriend/kickboxer). There is no smirking, no niceties — just chasing, punching and shooting.

Statham and Owen (may they make many more movies together) aren’t even properly introduced before they start trying to kill each other, and Statham’s big scene with a chair is as elaborate as a Jackie Chan set piece, minus the whimsy.

The implacable Statham isn’t the man to play internal struggle, but the way he keeps trying to put a cork in the violence gives the movie a moral backing of sorts. Knowing there’s a little decency out there makes it OK to enjoy the rude impunity of everyone else. When asked to identify himself, one bad dude (whom we barely get to know) replies, “I’m the man who gets to fly around in an unmarked helicopter with a gun in his pocket.”