Killer Elite
Just a standard Statham flick, with a John Le Carré framing device, some kind of SAS Oman Civil War intervention. Takes a back seat to the wall-to-wall action sequences. Yvonne Strahovski does a mean Australian accent, throwing another shrimp in the barbie.
This is a moderately complex plot with several factions, conflicting agendas, oil sheiks and civil wars. The cast is good, the action is intense, shot blows up. Proper good job mate.
The “natives” are represented by the Oman sheik, a former caliph that got kicked out and demoted from his oil-rich nation. His sons got whacked, except the little one, being educated in the UK elite system. He’s not very happy to inherit leadership over some camel fuckers, he’d rather remain in his hedonistic lifestyle abroad.
The empire is represented by the feather dudes, a shadowy council part of the UK intelligence committee. They contract the dirty work to some former SAS dude who never shook off the ethos, and thinks he is still a patriot, instead of a street samurai, hired by some mobsters.
Our hero just wants to be left alone, to build his big house in Australia and be with his high school sweetheart. His American buddy bites off more than he can chew, so he needs to get back in the fray for one last time.
The multiple factions fight one another, sometimes with “triels” like The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. Most of the times Krav Maga is enough.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.