Caan and Duvall are Mike Locken and George Hansen, two specialists who work for a private company that does contract work for the Central Intelligence Agency. They are assigned to guard a valuable defector, but something goes wrong and Locken is left crippled, put on the shelf by his superiors. When a kill squad threatens an Asian diplomat, the company recalls Locken to safeguard him, and he recruits two outsiders (Burt Young and Bo Hopkins) to help him.
The movie is one of Peckinpah's least known, coming at the tail end of his best work as his health and odd creative choices (a movie based on the C.W. McCall novelty CB-trucker song "Convoy?") began to move him from the "must see" to the "we'll see" category. It revisits one of his standard themes of men who have lived by a code trying to deal with a world that no longer respects that code. Locken and Hansen find themselves among people whose only loyalty is to themselves and the offered paychecks and they handle this disorientation in different ways. Locken seems to want to try to keep some semblance of what used to be, but his friend Mac (Young) argues against it.
Peckinpah seems to have little control over his story, as it bounces around between buddy comedy bits, bitterly cynical observations on the world, inspirational rehabilitation sequences and noble soliloquy from the Asian diplomat Yuen Chung (the always-welcome Mako). But it makes all these caroms without anything really invested in any of them, giving the impression of several skits or short scenes related only by the appearance of the same characters in each. Caan and Duvall were at their peak when the movie was made in 1975, but unfortunately Peckinpah was not. Neither the story nor the movie take full advantage of the star power at their command and so The Killer Elite winds up in-between: More than an interesting footnote, but much, much less than a top-flight main feature.
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