Tag Archives: assassins

Killer Elite is Really, Really Real. Really.

Posted on by

This first appeared a ways back on Splice Today.
_____
The most interesting part about Killer Elite is not the film’s claim that it’s derived from factual events. The most interesting part is how utterly, obviously preposterous the claim is. The veracity of the book The Feather Men, on which the film is based, is itself disputed. But there can be no dispute about the film. The assassin-tries-to-give-up-the-game-but-is-hauled-back-for-one-last-mission-while-a-new-love-blossoms plot is so hoary at this point that if it ever happened to a real assassin in real life, he’d shoot himself out of sheer mortification.

I doubt the filmmakers really intended to convince us in any serious way. Killer Elite isn’t a great movie by any means, but it’s not especially stupid either. I’m a little surprised at the critical drubbing it’s taken, to be honest. Obviously, if you went to this expecting great art you’d be disappointed, but only an idiot would go into this expecting great art. I paid my money expecting to see Jason Stratham glower pleasingly from improbably choreographed fight scene to improbably choreographed fight scene, and there was indeed pleasing glowering and improbable choreography. As a bonus, his sensitive killer schtick was surprisingly convincing. When Stratham learns that his associates have offed yet another random innocent, he always manages to look just pissed enough to show you he has a conscience, but not so pissed that you forget he’s a hardened killer. After a bystander he’s been holding a gun on screams and he fails to shoot her, his look of regret suggests both self-reproach for not pulling the trigger and self-reproach for ever thinking about pulling the trigger in the first place. Compared to his restrained performance, DeNiro’s oleaginous mugging is nauseating — but, to be fair, I expected that when I went into the theater too. On the plus side, though, DeNiro isn’t actually onscreen that much; he only really blights the beginning and end.

So like I said; it’s a genre film with a solid lead, and it delivers its genre pleasures in an efficient manner. The filmmakers are not geniuses, but they seem to know what they’re about. Why pretend that any of us believe for a moment that this is a true story?

The first answer I came up with is nostalgia. The film takes place (we are told repeatedly) in 1980, during the Cold War. It’s an espionage film set in the heydey of espionage; you could see the whole thing as an homage to James Bond or John Le Carre. We’re supposed to pretend its “real” to better enjoy the period feel.

The only problem with this explanation is that there isn’t a whole lot of period feel. The characters don’t have cell phones, admittedly, and there are some truly heinous unlicensed mutton-chops, but there isn’t any real Mad-Men-esque effort to recreate the ambience of an earlier time. Killer Elite doesn’t even take advantage of that Cold War staple, the Russians. Instead, the movie’s plot revolves around complicated machinations instigated by British meddling in the Middle East — hardly a scenario that needs to be plucked from three decades ago.

Which may be the point. The movie opens with a tease noting that the events of the film take place in a time of economic recession as well as of “revolution, assassination and covert operation.” In other words, the more things change, the more they don’t. Whether Oman then or Iraq now, the Brits (and the Americans, of course) are still staggering around unscrupulously searching for oil and finding blood.

The movie doesn’t really follow through here either though. Most of the film is set in Britain, not the Middle East, and while there’s some vague jowl-shaking about how SAS involvement in Oman was a bad idea, nobody seems to care all that much. In the end, the westernized scion of the sheik wants to enjoy his wealth, not repel the infidel. If espionage fails, capitalism doesn’t — which facilitates the requisite ironic twist ending, but doesn’t do much to explain Osama bin Laden.

There’s still that question, then: why pretend it’s real? So I did what I do when I’m stumped and asked my wife. As is usually the case, she had an instant answer. “Assassins!” she said. “Everybody wants to believe in assassins! It’s just like they want to believe in ninjas.”

It does have the ring of truth. An assassin movie is a little like a ghost story told round a campfire; pretending it’s more than a fiction is part of the genre. Killer Elite doesn’t have anything on its mind in particular; it’s just fulfilling its function.
 

killer-elite-wallpaper-01

Gluey Tart: This Night’s Everything

Posted on by


Akira Minazuki, 2011, June

 
I love this cover. Love it. Minazuki’s style really does it for me because it’s sort of realistic (I said sort of), understated, and charmingly awkward. Not hugely awkward – charmingly. I insist. Minazuki also did Tonight’s Take-Out Night,” which I loved (you can tell because I still remember it, which rarely happens in a months-later kind of way). I’ve also seen a scanlation of another of her stories (about a shinigami) that I loved as well. So we’re four stars solid behind Akira Minazuki.

Her story lines aren’t quite typical, and her characterizations include the subtle details that allow you to jump fully into the story. What could be better than a death god, you might ask? I’ll tell you. Assassins. Assassins trump everything else, especially if they assassinate in sharp, mod-cut suits and use swords. Swords, people. (Some of you might remember my admitted fondness-shading-toward-obsession for assassins of the sword-wielding, brooding headcase variety, a.k.a. Aya in Weiss Kruez. Most of you have no idea what the hell Weiss Kruez is, of course, and while that makes me sad, I’ve come to accept it.)

There was some kind of war in the immediate prehistory of this book, which somehow included individuals fighting on their own with swords (or so it appears in the flashbacks), and some of those lone fighters were recruited to guard the Professor, about whom we know little except that he must have won, since he now runs this large organization of bodyguards and assassins who clear the Professor’s path or some such fascistic euphemism. Nanao has been with the group for ten years and hides his pain behind the refrigerator – I mean, behind a façade of good humor and easy charm.

And we have Aoi, whose name I can remember, although that’s only because I keep thinking it’s “Aioli.” I don’t like mayonnaise, though, even fancy French mayonnaise with garlic in it. Whipping oil and raw eggs together until they’re gelatinous and slimy strikes me as a deeply perverse thing to do. Also, Aoi is a lot of vowels. As an English speaker, all those vowels without the calming influence of a consonant seems to be asking for trouble. At any rate, Aoi shows up, a 19-year-old recruit who takes himself very, very seriously and gets paired with Nanao, who keeps getting his partners killed. Oops. Ha ha!

This starts out as a genre I think of as friendship porn. There is close camaraderie, there is banter, there is some thawing of the quiet, stoic, uptight, enigmatic dude (known in the business as the QSUED, he makes absurd proclamations like “How can hands that kill people show any concern?”) brought about by the largely unflagging cheer, flouting of rules and decorum, and casual flirting of the other guy (or the OG, who says things like, “A little resistance makes it hot, right?”). The OG makes it clear he likes the QSUED, even though he’s haughty and hard to deal with, and the QSUED makes it clear he is brooding and enigmatic and we aren’t going to find out what the hell he might or might not think. The key is that the QSUED would never let the OG take the liberties he does with the QSUED’s dignified person if he didn’t really care about the OG. At some point he graces the OG with a small, enigmatic smile, so you know that deep down, he does have feelings. AWWW!

As is so often the case, this creator has some odd ideas about courtship. Nanao returns from an assassination, blood splashed across his face, eyes wild, and climbs on top of a horrified Aoi. Nanao explains that the killing gets him hot and Aoi just needs to help him get off. Perfectly reasonable, right? Aoi manages to slow things down by almost biting off the two fingers Nanao has stuck in his mouth, and soon Nanao figures out the Aoi is a virgin. He puts this together with a previous observation that Aoi’s sword is unnicked and determines that Aoi isn’t really a soldier, like he is, and wonders, “What kind of mistake got him tied up in this?”

Having decided that Aoi is essentially pure and untouched, Nanao decides to keep him that way. Years into their partnership, we find out that Nanao has delivered all the killing blows, sparing Aoi that loss of innocence. (I would call this splitting hairs, but it makes all the difference to Nanao.) Now, I don’t know about y’all, but I find all this very romantic.

After years of being an assassin, Aoi eventually, as you might expect, has to kill someone. It is impressively bloody and dramatic, and Aoi completely falls apart. Now, again, I’m not entirely sure I’m sold on this aspect of the characterization, since this guy’s been helping Nanao take people down for years, and I’d think he might have gotten over the whole thing a little. But never mind. It’s fine because it finally gets our boys together in an emotionally and physically intimate way. I love the way all this is drawn, by the way. Nanao is giving Aoi his first blow job (or his first anything), and here’s Aoi:

Ohhhhh!!!!!! Angsty!!!!!! Now we finally get the sex scene we’ve building up to for about 87 pages (give or take a splash page). It’s angsty as well, but also tender. And hot. Totally worth the wait, if not for the actual sex, then for the morning after, when Aoi finally spills his secret.

Now this sets some shit in motion. Nanao goes off to take care of things for Aoi, and it’s a big-time sweep-him-off-his-feet gesture. It changes everything and sets their murky organization after Nanao’s head. Things happen, other things happen, Aoi gives in to the inevitable “love him need him gotta have him for my own” revelation we all saw coming from page one (especially if we happened to look at the cover), and the sailing off into the sunset of yaoi bliss thing is even handled in a sort of dangerous, edgy way that I found deeply pleasing. Possibly thrilling, in, you know, a kind of subdued way.

I very seldom get all directive on you, the reader (in part because I’m not entirely convinced there will be any readers), but in this case I’m telling you, seriously, check this out. Will you love it if you don’t love assassins? I can’t say because I don’t understand people who don’t love assassins and therefore have no idea what they might find pleasing. Mayonnaise, probably.