When viewed as a battle of awful accents and shoddy cat and mouse intrigue, Killing Season fully succeeds. The tagline for the film reads “The purest form of war is one on one,” quite the contrary here, as the latest film from Mark Steven Johnson (Ghost Rider, Daredevil) is a dead-on-arrival slog of post-wartime revenge and redemption. Killing Season is entirely okay with resting on its pure surface levels laurels, as its intended “thriller” approach grows increasingly familiar and forgettable.
Stars Robert De Niro and John Travolta turn a familiar setup of “The Most Dangerous Game” into an ostensible showdown of wits that makes an episode of Tom and Jerry seem riveting by comparison. Killing Season is filled to the brim with the kind of wrongful moaning, bloodshed, and offensive schmaltz that even Travolta and De Niro seem to be above.
Travolta, donning a thick jet-black beard and a risible Serbian accent has seen better days. You’d have to look back a few years, mainly in Tony Scott’s The Taking of Pelham 123, where Travolta actually possessed an assured on-screen presence. Here he plays Emil Kovac, a veteran of the Bosnian War looking to seek out one of the men responsible for executing his fellow soldiers during the war. Enter De Niro, an actor who used to tear the screen apart with his visceral intensity; he’s now content with sleepwalking through roles and collecting paychecks with ease. Picture De Niro’s Max Cady from Cape Fear retiring from his life as a sociopath, sans tattoos, and living a secluded and quiet life in the mountains and you’d be close to De Niro’s Benjamin Ford – who now assumes the role of the hunted.
Ford is estranged from his son Chris (Milo Ventimiglia), another non-presence and sad excuse for a redemptive arc. Ford’s rustic cabin and southern accent are as phony as his own empty existence: here’s a man who still can’t quite shake the war as he’s riddled with shooting leg pains and something resembling a troubled conscience. It’s never quite clear whether Ford is bothered by what he did or if he’s just bored with his life.
Either way, things kick off when Kovac comes to the states seeking vengeance. The two meet in the woods, drink Jägermeister, listen to Johnny Cash, and share old war stories. “You’re a weird duck,” says Ford referring to his new friend. Uh yeah. Ford hardly questions the idea of a random Serbian showing up near his cabin. After a night of drinking, they’re best buds and in the morning, the hunt begins! Except these two past screen icons and the film’s tepid screenplay have nothing to offer up. The script penned by Evan Daugherty (Snow White and the Huntsman) is nothing more than a lame revenge story as Kovac seeks a proper confession from Ford regarding his war sins.
Round and round they go as each men escapes death multiple times, with the oversimplified narrative perfectly aligning itself with Johnson’s passive job behind the camera. There are some unintentionally hilarious sequences here to ease the insufferable pain: Ford urinating on himself to cleanse a wound, Kovac being water-boarded by Ford with a combination of lemon juice and salt, and each’s own constant grandstanding on karma, fate, and lessons of war. The thematic misery ensues without the slightest bit of irony or shock. De Niro and Travolta are surely playing for keeps, but there’s nothing even remotely serious to acknowledge here.
As it stands in 2013 Killing Season is truly one of the worst things to rear its head. It’s hard to even make out what kind of audience Killing Season was made for, but surely it all makes sense when one pictures this ridiculously trite VOD offering as something our father’s would have cherished back in 1985.
