ELIMINATORS

2016 | DIR. JAMES NUNN | REVIEW BY SHAUN CRAWFORD.

Another fisticuffs outing from British martial arts master Scott Adkins, this time teaming up with his GREEN STREET HOOLIGANS 3 director James Nunn for this revenge thriller set on his home turf of London.

Curious, however, that he should play a yank. Presumably a prerequisite for WWE Studios who produced the film.

In it he plays ex-US federal agent Thomas McKenzie, living the quiet life in England after he and his family were relocated through the Witness Protection Agency.  After a botched home invasion his Chevy Chase (face) ends up all over the telly and he finds himself evading the hitman who was sent by the baddies he was hiding from in the first place.

It's all very ho-hum. This is the kind of throw-away nonsense we've come to expect from Danny Dyer - presumably Eastenders had him too busy for this shoot - but it's the kind of fluff Adkins can do in his sleep. All that pesky plot stuff is just gap-filler until he gets his next chance to kick heads and take names... and take his shirt off. He
does that a bit too.

​To that, Nunn can just barely shoot an action sequence favouring pragmatic utilitarian choices over imagination. Which is a shame because a couple at times ELIMINATORS verges on some imaginative direct-to-DVD stuff (a hand-to-hand melee in a cable-car in particular) and, were it not for Nunn, could have been another Adkins class-act up there with his NINJA films, as it is, it barely scraped through.

And we're not even going to talk about the hackneyed script and unforgivable American accents from just about everyone involved. If it's got one thing going for it its refreshing to see films of this ilk set somewhere other than the grimy streets of Somewhere-USA. The rained-out photography and cockney accents peppered with slickly choreographed ultra-violence seems to have a different kind of punch on that side of the pond.

In the end even the classy presence of Scottish hard-man James Cosmo isn't enough to take ELIMINATORS from tired to passable. Maybe next time we should get Isaac Florentine in for another collaboration, get some real wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am DTV class up in this joint.