Fifteen years ago, the first big-screen teaming of Robert De Niro and John Travolta might have been a genuine event. Now it’s just another dubious paycheck job for a pair of aging hams that’s getting a token theatrical release a month ahead of its arrival on video.
“Killing Season’’ provides Travolta — with a shaved head, an Amish-style beard and a thick, dubious accent — endless opportunities to chew the scenery as a loquacious Serbian soldier who somehow survived a mass execution by US soldiers during the Balkan ethnic wars in 1995.
Eighteen years later, he has tracked down the grumpy leader of that (historically nonexistent) death squad, played by De Niro. The latter is living a hermitic existence in an overdecorated cabin in the Appalachians and avoiding his very briefly glimpsed family.
You would think someone who executed a bunch of Serbians would be wary of meeting one by chance in the woods, but De Niro invites Travolta to his cabin for a very tedious evening of drunken conversation and listening to Johnny Cash records.
The next morning, De Niro — who has foresworn guns for cameras — agrees to join Travolta for a deer hunt, with both men carrying crossbows. It soon becomes apparent that De Niro (or, as is painfully obvious, often De Niro’s stunt double) is Travolta’s actual prey.
If you’ve always wanted to see Robert De Niro forced to thread a steel rod through an open wound and then strung upside down by John Travolta, this is the movie for you.
Ditto if the idea of De Niro firing an arrow that pierces both of Travolta’s cheeks and pins him to the cabin door sounds appealing.
Not to mention De Niro waterboarding his wounded prey with heavily salted lemonade.
Mark Steven Johnson, who directed such cinematic landmarks as “Ghost Rider’’ and “Daredevil,’’ moves the muddled story along at a snail’s pace toward an anti-climactic ending in which God is invoked repeatedly.
He throws in lots of scenic shots to pad things out to barely an hour and a half.
De Niro mostly looks miserable and very tired (a document glimpsed on-screen hilariously claims his character was born in 1970) and prattles on endlessly about forgetting the past.
You better believe he’s trying to forget the dreadful “Killing Season,’’ which the busy actor shot at least half a dozen films ago.
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