The character played by Robert Duvall is very different in the book. He's not friends with the protagonist, Mike Locken. They don't even know each other. In the movie they're given this intense, homoerotic relationship, presumably because the movie couldn't go near a significant and perverse element to the hero's maiming.

The driver character is fairly consistent in the two versions of the story, though there is one hugely important addition to this person in the book that didn't make it into the movie.

The character of the gun expert is wildly different. In the movie, they make him kind of crazy but in a sort of A Team way. He's also one of Locken's old and trusted friends. In the book, Locken doesn't know this person, who's very young and forced on him by his old boss who's giving him the mission in the first place.

There are no ninjas in the book.

Locken in the book is trying to help an exiled African leader return to his country before he's murdered. There are no fewer than three elite assassins (hence the title) converging on him in London.

Locken has to start as soon as he gets the assignment. And from the moment he starts it's constant mayhem.

Everywhere they go, from the apartment to the airport to wherever, they run into explosive violence.

Locken also has an interesting backstory involving finding with Cuban revolutionaries, alongside Castro and Guevara. A woman from those days, with whom he was involved but who fingered him for being counter-revolutionary, which almost killed him but instead just landed him in a Cuban jail for three years.

This woman is one of the three assassins Locken has to deal with. Another is a French Algerian explosives expert and the third is the South African man who starts the story by violently injuring Locken so that he can never work as a field agent again.

This is a book that's brutal to its characters. They're all convincing and distinct and Rostand is subtle with his positioning of them. You might realize that somebody near the end of the book is somebody you haven't seen since the very beginning. And just as you're enjoying that bit of consistency, maybe even feeling a little cozy about it, that person will die violently right in front of you.

So the movie, whatever, it has its points but it's frustratingly flawed in so many ways that it's really best watched for its aesthetic qualities and a few other bits of business, like some good acting.

But the book, the book is great, if you're into this sort of thing. And it's the first of three about Mike Locken!

Interestingly, while these sorts of books tend to be fantasies of male competence or male expertise or male excellence, The Killer Elite returns again and again to visions of male inadequacy. The hero is constantly scrambling just ahead of certain defeat and is always figuring out what's going on too late to do anything useful about it.

It's an unusual approach and a refreshing one, though perhaps it also explains why the book appears not to be especially well liked by readers who enjoy macho action thrillers.

The first line is "Locken slid his eyes away from the four repeater screens of the infra-red warning system, each etching in thermal profile, one sector of approach to the farmhouse".