Review of Killing Season (2013) by Thomas W — 22 Jul 2013

John Travolta and Robert De Niro star in Killing Season, a drama about the repercussions and aftermath of war set in the backwoods and foothills of Appalachia where a reclusive American veteran, Ben Ford (De Niro - Taxi Driver), has decided to retire to live in solitude after his unsettling war experience during the European Bosnian-Serb war in the Balkans during the early 1990's.

His experience is reluctantly brought back up with the seemingly random appearance -- although not random at all -- of Emil Kovac (Travolta - Pulp Fiction), a Serb, who has traveled to the states to find the soldiers he believes are as equally responsible of wartime atrocities to his own countrymen.

Killing Season begins slowly as it centers upon Ford's hermitic life in which he shuns his son (Milo Ventimiglia - "Heroes") but it quickly becomes a more frantic film with the arrival of Emil and the revelation of his true intentions.

It becomes a game of cat-and-mouse and a man vs. man fight for survival as the two men are pitted against one another in the forest with a few random weapons ... and what they do not have they easily make.

The film has many eye-rolling moments but just as many gruesome scenes of torture and pain (stomach churning, actually). The tables are turned more times than I could count. Some of the dialogue is laugh-out-loud campy and Travolta's accent is unidentifiable (it isn't Serbian) .

.. but that just makes the film a little more entertaining.