The 2013 John Travolta/Robert De Niro Stinker Killing Season is Deadly Dull
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The 2013 stinker Killing Season was at one point eyed as a reunion vehicle for Face/Off stars Nicolas Cage and John Travolta. That certainly would have set the dreary little nothing of a movie apart.
Alas, by the time Ghost Rider auteur Mark Steven Johnson’s grim drama hit empty theaters in 2013 Travolta’s revenge-hungry Serbian warrior faced off against Robert De Niro rather than Cage.
Of course there was a time when De Niro signing on for any movie would be big news and a sign of quality and prestige. This may be hard for you whippersnappers to believe but for decades De Niro wasn’t just admired but revered.
De Niro wasn’t just an actor, he was something closer to the actor. He was a pure artist, the personification of his craft at its most noble. Alas, that was a LONG time ago.
When De Niro was cast in Killing Season, his participation was more likely to engender half-hearted shrugs of indifference than excitement. Killing Season’s only real draw is that it represents the only time Travolta and De Niro have shared the screen in their long, legendary careers.
De Niro was once the gold standard of heavyweight thespians, the Daniel Day Lewis of his day. Then he became a paycheck guy just like Travolta and Cage and John Cusack and Bruce Willis and any number of veterans just trying to make a living and pay for various ex-wives by any means necessary.
So when the star of Raging Bull went to war with the beloved star of Saturday Night Fever we were, unfortunately, over both actors, individually and collectively.
De Niro delivers an appropriately shrug-worthy performance in Killing Season as Benjamin Ford, an American veteran who served in Bosnia and now just wants to be left alone to enjoy his golden years in relative peace and quiet.
Killing Season suggests a more pretentious, ambitious version of the late-period Bruce Willis vehicles I wrote about recently where the star’s exhaustion and disinterest is palpable and everything has been pared down to the bare essentials.
Benjamin lives in a cozy, remote cabin in the Appalachian mountains of Tennessee until Emil Kovač (John Travolta), a dark, sinister figure from his distant past heads to the United States on a deeply personal mission of vengeance.
A fascinatingly miscast Travolta gives his cold-blooded killer an Eastern European accent that sounds unmistakably like Boris of Boris and Natasha fame throughout.
Incidentally, Travolta has a cameo as himself in 1992’s Boris and Natasha: The Movie while De Niro played Fearless Leader in 2000’s The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle so they’re familiar with the character’s cadences as well as his literally cartoonish villainy.
As we have established indelibly here, while Nicolas Cage is a true ACTOR who gets deep inside the characters he plays Travolta is a goddamn movie star. He doesn’t disappear inside characters: characters disappear inside his massive persona and shtick.
It would accordingly require incredible suspension of disbelief to look at Travolta with his silly hair, cartoonish accent and unashamed theatricality and see a grizzled, half-mad European soldier and not the popular star of films such as Grease, Pulp Fiction and Urban Cowboy.
Travolta is not convincing as a Serb or a soldier but he is entertaining. Killing Season is too lurid and superficial to deal with issues as bleak as genocide, war and PTSD. It wants desperately to say something profound about men and violence and madness when it’s really just a glorified b movie that stumbled into A-list talent during the C-list stage of their careers.
Emil first poses as a mere tourist but eventually reveals his true identity to his oblivious longtime enemy. A bloody and unimaginative game of cat and mouse ensues that involves a fair amount of brutality.
It’s Dad’s Introduction to Torture Porn as these veterans endure all manner of graphic unpleasantness as Emil tries to get his American adversary to confess to war crimes and finally resolve their conflict once and for all.
I suspect that De Niro and Travolta signed on for these 80 minutes of drudgery because the screenplay by Evan Daugherty gives them both big, actorly speeches where they confront the ghosts of the past that have a way of bleeding into the uncertain present.
Killing Season has the most maddeningly unearned and out of place happy ending this side of Loqueesha.
After establishing its lead characters as fatalistic warriors on a collision course with destiny one or more might not survive the movie inexplicably decides that hunting another human being, and being hunted by another human teaches all the life lessons anyone could ask for.
All it takes is being tortured and hunted by a long-ago enemy to give De Niro’s sleepy dad the spiritual growth he needs to finally meet his grandson. Ben previously told his son he would not be able to make it to his grandson’s baptism because he had unnamed busywork to do instead.
He never specifies exactly what he must do instead of being there for his family but judging from his tone of voice it seems like a combination of light dusting, folding laundry and taking out the trash and recyclables.
Killing Season lazily gives its hero an insultingly half-assed and perfunctory conflict solely for the sake of wrapping it up in the last five minutes in the most thuddingly arbitrary manner imaginable.
It’s as if, after unsuccessfully trying to make a brutal existential drama about the trauma of war the director remembered that he was the screenwriter of Grumpy Old Men and could always just end things with old men being happy and achieving peace even if such an ending violently conflicts with everything that precedes it.
Emil turns out just fine as well. Torturing and nearly murdering Ben was just something he had to get out of his system. Once he’s done with that he can move on with his life and maybe get married, start a family and run for political office.
On the plus side, Killing Season is merciful enough to let us go after an interminable 80 minutes and is available for free on IMDB with ads. That I remember a particularly brutal sequence leading into an ad for Paul Blart: Mall Cop more than I do anything that actually happens in the film itself speaks to its intense forgettability.
Then again, the juxtaposition of extreme sadism and Kevin James’ iconic lawman is funny and unexpected, which is more than can be said about Killing Season.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Failure
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