It’s easy to get sniffy about films like Eliminators, spam-fisted actioners featuring one lunk or another kicking the life out of some meathead, delivering the coup de grace with a quip that’s meant to be James Bond but is more often than not Steven Seagal.
Even Seagal has been known to make good films, so let’s park the prejudices and get down to action.
Scott Adkins, a British actor, plays a federal agent hiding out in London on some witness protection program, whose life is upended when three local desparadoes looking for a stash of cocaine break in to his house waving guns about.
They threaten his daughter, bad mistake, and are soon all dead. But killing people generates publicity and Thomas’s face is now all over the TV screens. Word that he’s in London reaches the guy in America Thomas has been hiding from, Cooper (James Cosmo, another Brit), a gangster who also happens to be Thomas’s daughter’s grandfather.
Thomas, clearly, got far more embedded in whatever undercover operation he was running on Cooper than is usual, though the storyline barely goes into this, which is actually quite neat – we can work it out.
Soon, to pick up the plot again, Cooper has sent a hitman to London to finish off Thomas and scoop up the grand-daughter. And so it begins, the cat and mouse (if felines and rodents had really big fists) that will dominate the rest of the movie.
Adkins is the latest in that line of Seagal/Lundgren action heroes and like them tends to pop up in the sort of movies you used to buy in small supermarkets in a wire rack by the checkout.
He’s big and ripped and rose to prominence in a string of films with Ninja in the title. He’s a big Van Damme fan, and metes out the Van Dammage like his hero. Is he going to pirouette kick? You know he is. Like JCVD, Adkins has the goods.
Against him is Stu Bennett – unusually a Brit playing a Brit. He’s a fine bit of casting, because Bennett has a sour presence and can fight at least as well as Adkins. He’s billed as Wade Barrett, because that was his WWE name, where he also went by the sobriquet Bad News Barrett for a while. His Bishop is bad news for Thomas.
The plot is essentially the second Bourne movie – one specialist chasing another, with extreme prejudice in mind – with perhaps a dash of those Liam Neeson “skills” movies. Director James Nunn, having done his homework, keeps the pace up and doesn’t get in the way of his actors. He can stage a fight well, and a car chase too. I’ve seen another of his films, Tower Block, which was less well written than this but well acted and directed.
Eliminators won’t be winning awards for acting but it’s efficient, lean, doesn’t mess about and doesn’t over-burden us with the characters’ feelings or backstories. The only time it does go there – as Thomas monologues away briefly – you’re glad it has decided on the whole not to do that.
What else do you need to know? It’s set in London, takes place mostly at night-time, the soundtrack nods to Bourne with its percussive repetitions, and there are even some interactions by suits “back at base” for extra Bourne-style shading.
But mostly it’s about the fights, and there’s a good one in a cable car over the River Thames, and another one near the end with Barrett and Adkins squaring off while Nunn pulls the camera back and lets the two men go at it. Adkins the martial-arts guy and Bennett the onetime bare-knuckle fighter are a good match.
Clearly, everyone concerned thought this was what the film was all about, which is correct. But it doesn’t mean we need to see pretty much the same fight all over again about ten minutes later. It’s really the only foot Eliminators puts wrong.
Eliminators – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
