The Killer Elite is a 1975 American action thriller film directed by Sam Peckinpah and written by Marc Norman and Stirling Silliphant, adapted from the Robert Syd Hopkins novel Monkey in the Middle.

[3] It stars James Caan and Robert Duvall as a pair of elite mercenaries who become bitter rivals and are caught on opposite sides of a proxy war over a foreign dignitary in the streets of San Francisco.

[9] Mike Locken and George Hansen are longtime friends and professional partners, agents of Communications Integrity (ComTeg), a private intelligence agency that handles covert assignments for the CIA.

O’Leary, a CIA agent, hires ComTeg to protect Yuen Chung, a Taiwanese politician who arrived in the United States with a delegation that includes his daughter, Tommie.

Locken assembles his old team, including driver Mac and marksman Jerome Miller, but they do not know that Collis is in collaboration with Hansen, hoping to unseat current ComTeg director Lawrence Weybourne.

The following day, Locken sails the yacht to the empty ships of the Naval Reserve Fleet at Suisun Bay and orders Chung and Tommie to stay aboard.

It was to be demolished by the city for the Embarcadero Center redevelopment project, and Peckinpah changed the film's shooting schedule to take advantage of the event.

"[6] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film 2.5 stars out of 4 and opened his review by stating, "Sam Peckinpah's 'The Killer Elite' is directed and acted with a certain nice style, but it puts us through so many convolutions of the plot that finally we just don't care.

"[12] Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune awarded the same 2.5-star grade and criticized the "moralizing dialog" as well as "half-hearted martial arts battles" that "come off as a sop to the young kung-fu movie audience.

"[13] Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times wrote that the film "... wastes the formidable talents of director Sam Peckinpah and James Caan, who heads a first-rate cast, on a trite and murky formula thriller plot usually relegated to the less ambitious TV movies.

"[14] The Washington Post praised the film as "... a disarmingly funny and sympathetic action-suspense melodrama" and noted, "Neither the ads nor the opening wave of reviews have given the picture much credit for humor, which happens to be its strongest attribute.

"[8] Tom Milne of The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote, "Craftily marrying the martial arts fad to the anti-CIA craze to produce a sort of Enter the Dragon meets Three Days of the Condor, the script is of course a mixture of opportunism and joke—as Peckinpah freely acknowledges with a deliriously absurd (yet splendid) final holocaust in which hordes of sword-carrying Japanese ambush, with highly predictable results, Americans armed to the teeth with machine-guns.

"[9] Filmink claimed the film "feels like it was made by an exhausted cocaine addict doing it for cash (though Caan has some decent byplay with Robert Duvall at the beginning, demonstrating once more how much he rose when he had someone strong to bounce off)."

"[17][failed verification] In 1977, James Caan said he only made the film because his advisers told him to work with Peckinpah, and he rated it a zero on a scale to ten.