Wednesday, October 2, 2013

Killing Season (2013)

Hey kids! Do you want to see 70 year old Robert De Niro as an action lead? Do you want to see John Travolta speaking in a ridiculously over the top accent while sporting a silly looking chin-strap beard? Do you want to see them run through the woods and fight each other with bows and arrows and then torture each other?

Yeah, me neither. I don't know about "Killing Season," you guys. On one hand, it's not that it's poorly made or anything. In fact I must admit to finding it reasonably interesting, and I never was bored with it. But on the other hand this action movie is hard to take seriously considering that the lead is a septuagenarian, and certainly looks like it. And it's not like he's Charles Grodin or anything, where the guy is like 97 but looks 52. De Niro actually looks a bit older than 70, struggling to move faster than a slow hobble and seeming like he's about to keel over and die at any second whenever the movie needs him to run. Which is a lot.

And while I personally really like Travolta as an actor, he really is hard to take seriously while he's doing his trademarked line delivery complete with Walken-esque voice cracks while doing an accent like he's Pavel Chekov. Wearing that absurd facial hair that makes him look like the top of his old-timey football helmet is missing doesn't help. And it's not that he's bad in this, in fact his performance is solidly chilling, but being John Travolta he takes it so far over the top that it borders on ridiculous. I still kind of liked him in this, though, I won't lie.

Nice. Now say "Nuclear Wessels."

The story is your pretty standard revenge setup, in which Emil (Travolta) and Ben (De Niro) are Bosnian War veterans. During the conflict, Ben shot Emil execution style and left him to die. Many years later, Emil has recovered and is seeking vengeance, finding out where Ben lives and traveling to his cabin in the woods somewhere in the Appalachians. At first Ben doesn't recognize Emil, taking him into his home and feeding him and drinking with him as Emil makes polite conversation that's clearly only skin-deep. That's actually the entire first act, which is almost completely made up of scenes featuring that awkward kind of tension when you know that one person is only playing at being nice. This is also the best bit of acting from Travolta in "Killing Season," as there are many little moments where you can see the facade crack a bit before he covers it back up again. It's awkward to watch but it's actually quite well acted.

Once they go out hunting for elk the charade is quickly dropped and Emil starts hunting Ben, which begins a pattern that dominates the last two acts of the film. This pattern is that one of them hurts the other to a degree that's a little too hard to buy them walking away from, which leads to the freshly injured person barely escaping death, which occasionally leads to them torturing their attacker, which leads to the attacker escaping the torture and hurting the torturer, and the cycle begins again. It's basically watching a game of Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots if it were "Deliverance." It's odd.

That's probably the biggest fault of the film. There's some really great dramatic tension going on at the beginning, but when it went all gory and "First Blood" on us, with De Niro running through the woods and patching his leg up with moss and making a bow out of a branch like he's Schwarzenegger in "Predator," it felt really out of place. It was like the movie started off like an intense, intimate, dialogue driven character drama, but all of a sudden it turned into a late 90's action movie staring Segal.

 Or, you know, something Travolta would have starred in during the late 90's.

I'm not saying that's bad, though. I love late 90's action movies. But the setup didn't really set the proper tone for the follow-through on this one. I could see it working as a short film perhaps, cutting out all the crap in the second act and most of the third, and having the entire thing take place in Ben's cabin instead of all through the woods. Then we'd be talking a nice, compact little story of revenge and forgiveness. Again, it's not that the story here is bad, it's just stretched out a bit too much, and the action is a bit too repetitive.

I will give the film this though, in terms of violence, it does what it does well. There are some really, really hard to watch moments in "Killing Season," and the amount of cringing one is likely to do is rather significant. I wouldn't call it a gore-flick, however, since it doesn't exist purely to be disgusting. The savagery on display is meant to be shocking in order to convey just a little bit of what the characters are feeling inside, and the savage places that we will go to in our anger. And there are moments when it certainly achieves that. Neither Ben or Emil is innocent, in fact they're both pretty terrible people, but through the violence they inflict on each other, they may find something like redemption. That's an interesting place to go in a movie like this, and for the most part, it does it well.

Jesus Christ, he looks so old he could have literally grown out of that tree.

I still get annoyed by De Niro's face, though. Seriously, has there ever been an occasion where he didn't look like he just smelled a really bad fart?

Check out the trailer for "Killing Season."

THE BOTTOM LINE - "Killing Season" has some interesting moments and decent acting in it, and the level of savagery is shocking to good effect, which I would say warrants a watch if you're a fan of either De Niro or Travolta. But it is a bit repetitive, and the amount of damage they're taking and still moving is pretty ridiculous, which makes it difficult to take seriously. Overall it's just okay. Would make a good double feature with "The Edge."

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