Handsome widescreen digital transfer for one of Sam Peckinpah’s most underestimated films, 1975’s angrily prescient satire on corporate America, whose ultra-cool surface belies the roiling fury at its bleak and bitter heart. James Caan and Robert Duvall are cynical operatives for a San Francisco-based intelligence agency, doing jobs too dirty even for the CIA. Early on, Caan is crippled by gunfire in a bloody double-cross and ‘retired’ from the company. At which point, The Killer Elite becomes a meditation on familiar Peckinpah themes of loyalty, betrayal and revenge.
Following Caan’s long rehabilitation, the film’s second half features a series of brilliantly filmed and edited set-pieces, including a Chinatown shoot-out, a dockyard face-off and a grand climax aboard a mothballed battleship in the US Navy’s graveyard fleet in North Bay, where Caan and grizzled sidekicks Burt Young and Bo Hopkins take on a small army of ninja assassins.