In a brusque, middle-order slice of Sam Peckinpah pump-action cinema, James Caan is an ops agent, betrayed and crippled by his partner-in-espionage Robert Duvall, and driven by the hunger for revenge and the need to make sense of his gung-ho world.
Familiar macho ethics and riotous blood-baths ensue in a modern, genre-swapping retelling of The Wild Bunch - men who bond on the violent, distilled fringes of society.
Peckinpah is never quite as comfortable with the high-rise terrain (including sloppy kung fu) as he is with the dusty rawhide of the West, but it still shows up the slick trigger-edits of new action cinema for the gutless vacuum it has become.