Pass I should have done. Really, the whole idea of this was bad to begin with. The opening credits encompass the guys placing a bomb with children playing in the background, and yet when the thing goes off, the building is actually in a light industrial area with no children around to speak of. Very weird. The purpose of blowing the place seems to be to spirit away some defector with a bad accent, which doesn't make any sense either. The first ten minutes the sound was really badly mixed, so it was hard to tell what they were saying . . . and it got worse from there. Caan gets shot up, then obligatory "invalid recovery" sequence begins, through which I fast-forwarded zestfully. And then I gave up for a couple of days, never intending to finish it, but one gets bored.

Protecting some generically Asian guy was the focus of the rest of the plot, which allowed for some generic ninjas to be introduced into the mix. The ludicrous scenes of ninjas stupidly charging into Uzi fire ensues after a lot of FAST-PACED, BREAK-NECK (yeah right) car chasing and lots of conversation. The heroes even start laughing at the stupidity it at one part, along with the audience.

Bad editing, direction, script, acting, concept, music, etc. Many reasons why nobody's ever hear of it. I wish my local video store would be more discriminating in their selection. This is easily one of the worst movies I've ever seen. Avoid.

Peckinpah had managed to work a great deal of magic out of similarly banal thriller material a few years before in THE GETAWAY, thanks to his trademark rapid fire editing of some furiously violent suspense sequences; that film also benefited from a typically cool performance from the charismatic Steve McQueen. With ELITE, the director clearly didn't care at all and shot everything as quickly and perfunctorily as possible. He appears to have forgotten even his most rudimentary of cinematic skills, clunkily filming everything with a generic, TV-Movie obviousness. Peckinpah isn't helped at all by James Caan and Robert Duvall, two normally fine and powerful actors who, undoubtedly due to their vaguely defined characters, give frankly dull performances that completely fail to draw us into the proceedings. The end result is a film that is easily tied with CONVOY as Peckinpah's most infuriatingly awful effort; its truly sad seeing such a major talent waste himself away on such utterly substandard rubbish.

Its a real shame that this film would inexplicably get a proper DVD release while absolute masterpieces like THE BALLAD OF CABLE HOGUE, BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA, CROSS OF IRON and PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID continue to languish in the vaults.