Review of Killing Season (2013) by Diego T — 17 Feb 2014

There's not much that can be said about a movie like Killing Season other than "Yeah, it's pretty fucking bad." Much like Only God Forgives, virtually nothing interesting happens in this movie, which means it doesn't quite lend itself to analysis or being picked apart. It's just a boring, rote, and derivative movie that has a great lead, a slightly less competent other lead, and absolutely laughable dialogue. Great job, Robert De Niro. You are now continuing your losing streak of legitimately terrible films. And to John Travolta... yeah, okay. I didn't really expect much of you. Keep up the bad work.

Killing Season is a blatantly historically inaccurate movie in which two survivors of the Bosnian war, each on different sides, fights each other in the woods of Buttfuck Nowhere, Appalachia. The movie's first scenes are graphic depictions of soldiers finding bodies piled up in trains in Bosnia... which is historically suspect. Then Robert De Niro shoots John Travolta in the head. But fortunately, Travolta is gifted with Miracle Get-Out-Of-Death-Free Movie Syndrome! He returns with a vengeance years later, after tracking De Niro down to his cabin in the woods. After beating around the bush for a while (during which time he could easily have just killed De Niro and had it over with), the two start a game of cat-and-mouse which fails to deliver any suspense at all. In summary, it's an intriguing premise, but wow... did they ever fuck it up.

De Niro plays a cranky old man, as he always seems to nowadays, and he is given very little characterization past that. Hey, here's an old guy who drinks bourbon and likes country music! So original. Meanwhile, John Travolta's Serbian accent sounds awesome... as long as you've never heard a Serbian accent before in your life. Seriously, did nobody notice this when they were filming the movie? It's like Travolta was doing research into the accent, found a Russian one he liked, and said "Eh, fuck it, they're both in eastern Europe." It doesn't help that both of them look legitimately bored throughout the whole movie, making me wonder why they even bothered being in it. Clearly not critical acclaim or getting a paycheck, because this movie bombed both critically and commercially.

The dialogue is pretty lame. All it amounts to is Travolta and De Niro opining on war and life and death and stuff for an hour and a half, but they didn't even bother writing more than a few lines of dialogue. The two only really have one conversation in the movie, which is then edited slightly to fit into other parts of the film. Trust me, the repetition is palpable, and makes the film feel long at only 90 minutes. There are a few good scenes, I must admit-- Travolta getting shot through the cheek with an arrow was pretty legit. But then we have a scene where De Niro waterboards him with lemonade? For fuck's sake. Every ten minutes, one of them takes control and gets the upper hand, turning the movie into a very predictable and extremely boring load of pretentious crap. War is hell, guys. We get it.

Final Score for Killing Season: 2/10 stars. It's exhaustingly self-important, poorly written, and laughably acted, but at least it has the decency to give us a few agreeable scenes and some nice cinematography. But overall, Killing Season fails on nearly every conceivable level. Perhaps I had far too low expectations for this movie (after all, it did get 11%, and Jed Groff recommended it, making me assume that it was the anus to end all anuses), because I didn't find it to be the absolutely abhorrent piece of shit that my colleagues apparently did. But still, there is very little about this boring and unsatisfying film to recommend. Oh, and that car crash did not look realistic at all. I laugh at your pitiful special effects, movie.