There’s a moment, about 90 minutes into Jason Statham’s latest vehicle, Killer Elite, when his character’s blonde Australian girlfriend, standing in a Parisian hotel room clad in only a bed sheet, sighs, ‘When will this be over?’ Her words may elicit a wry smile from the audience, having to endure what is little more than another boy’s own vanity project for Statham, with Clive Owen and Robert De Niro mistakenly along for the ride.

Based on a highly controversial non-fiction book by explorer and former SAS man, Sir Ranulph Fiennes, the film recounts the story of a secret society of ex-SAS officers sworn to protect their fellow soldiers past and present.

Statham plays reluctant hit man Danny, who is drawn back into the killing game from his ranch in Australia when his mentor Hunter (De Niro) is taken hostage.

Hunter refuses to accept $6 million to avenge the deaths of a renegade oil Sheikh’s three sons by assassinating the SAS soldiers responsible for the crimes during the secret Oman war.

Danny fails to spring his mentor from prison and discovers that he has been set up to take on the hits instead.

The Sheikh has two conditions: each of the guilty men must confess and their deaths must be made to look like accidents.

In Paris, Danny recruits his old team, ex-Paratrooper and ladies man Davies (Dominic Purcell) and American gadget geek Meier (Aden Young), and they plan the first hit on these SAS ‘geezers’ as Davies calls them, unaware they are on the radar of a shadowy group of suits known as the Feather Men.

The Feather Men was the title of Fiennes’s 1991 novel, which lifted the lid on his experiences in Oman and in which he claimed he was saved by the group when he was on the list of a hit squad called ‘The Clinic’.

It’s shady territory indeed and Fiennes’s book has never been authenticated by the government, whose records of the SAS’s role in the Omani war are still classified.

Sporting a comical 1980s moustache, Owen plays the Feather Men’s attack dog, Spike, a pensioned-off SAS soldier heading a team called The Locals, which executes orders from the men in suits, who prefer ‘not to get blood on our pinstripes’.

With Spike and his Locals now on their tail, Danny’s crew are in a race against time to bump off the targets, save Hunter and collect the money.

Killer Elite reduces to a series of chases and fight scenes: in cars, over rooftops, in hospital, interspersed with Danny’s flashbacks of his halcyon life in Australia with Anne (Yvonne Strahovski).

The creaky plot is complimented by wooden acting from the older Feather Men and some unselfconsciously cheesy action dialogue: ‘You can’t run away from who you are Danny!’ If they’d played this nonsense for laughs, it might actually have worked.

• Release Date: Friday 23 September 2011
• Certificate: 15
• Runtime: 116mins