Killing Season | Blu-ray Review

Academy Award winner Robert De Niro and two-time Oscar nominee John Travolta appear together onscreen for the first time in a bathetic mano-a-mano action thriller from Mark Steven Johnson (Ghost Rider, When in Rome), as the big-budget director continues his losing streak. Only a month after its release in a handful of contractually obligated theaters which came off the heels of a chance Karlovy Vary Int. Film Festival showing, Killing Season is now, for better or likely worse, available for the curious few.

Career soldier Benjamin Ford (De Niro) has retired to the Appalachian mountains and spends his days reading Hemingway and listening to Johnny Cash. Ford also dabbles in nature photography because living with horrific memories of war has spoiled the fun of hunting, but his isolated rustic cabin thankfully came pre-furnished with mounted deer heads. One day, the weathered man experiences car trouble and is helped by Kovac, a European tourist (Travolta) with bizarre facial hair and an even more unsettling accent. It begins to downpour, the stranger is offered shelter, they spend an evening bonding over Jägermeister and suddenly Ford is being hunted by the Serbian war criminal.

Eighteen years after surviving a bullet from Ford during the Serbian-Bosnian conflict, which was seemingly chosen at random by a filmmaker with no particular insight or interest in historical accuracy, Kovac is ready for revenge. Even with a manageable run-time of barely an hour and a half, the cat-and-mouse game is so exhausting that indiscriminately rooting for someone, anyone, to pull the trigger is inevitable. Kovac habitually gains the advantage only to withdraw, refusing to kill before Ford acknowledges his involvement in a mass execution of Bosnians.

There is something deeply disturbing about structuring an action film around torture as means of coaxing a proper confession to war-time sins. Tactlessly indifferent to the political implications of glorifying torture, the line between problematic entertainment and glaring ignorance is crossed when the American military veteran uses waterboarding. Admittedly, the ridiculousness of Travolta being water boarded with heavily salted lemonade lightens the blow a bit. It is almost challenging to find fault with the gratuitous violence because the looming absurdity of every move is so distracting. De Niro is forced to thread a steal rod through an open leg wound as a part of some pulley system then used to string him upside-down and Travolta has an arrow pierced through his cheeks pinning him to a cabin door. They even roll down a cliff in an SUV and bounce right.

Disc Review

The distributor may at least be congratulated for making no laughable attempts to pad the DVD and Blu-ray with special features. With only one paltry extra, the disc attests to its own insignificance. The “Killing Season Featurette” is part extended trailer and part interview, in which Travolta makes an empty statement on the happenstance of good men aligned with war mongers and Mark Stevens generously describes his film as “darkly fun, horrific and very touching”.

Final Thoughts

The disc is inessential for anyone other than De Niro or Travolta completists, but Killing Season has no business occupying the same shelf as Taxi Driver or Pulp Fiction. Oh, how the mighty have fallen to paycheck roles.