Agency and discover that the tricks as well as the dirt are on them." 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." 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." Arthur D. Murphy of Variety called the film "... an okay Sam Peckinpah actioner ... Cast performs admirable against the programmer demands of the story." 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." 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." Pauline Kael of The New Yorker saw in the protagonist's rehabilitation "... an almost childishly transparent disguise for Peckinpah's own determination to show Hollywood that he's not dead yet ... Amazingly, Peckinpah does rehabilitate himself; his technique here is dazzling." Peckinpah's use of violence in the fim, Kael continued, "... isn't gory and yet it's more daring than ever. He has never before made the violence itself so surreally, fluidly abstract; several sequences are edited with a magical speed—a new refinement." 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 ackowledges 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." 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