Movie Review: 3 Days to Kill
What We Liked
What We Didn't Like
The new film 3 Days to Kill is an original story created by Luc Besson and directed by McG. Those two names may lead you to expect a pretty good action film. If that was your guess, then you would be half right.
The film tells the story of Ethan Renner (Kevin Costner). He is an aging CIA hit man who is forced to retire due to a sudden illness for which there is no cure. This new reality forces him to reassess his priorities. He realizes he must try to reconnect with his estranged family before it is too late. While he attempts to awkwardly play catch up with the lives of his wife Christine (Connie Nielsen) and daughter Zooey (Hailee Steinfeld) a wild card, of sorts, appears.
The wild card is a young CIA agent, who calls herself Vivi (Amber Heard), who approaches Ethan and tries to recruit him for one last job. The payment you ask? That would be an experimental drug that may save him and give him the chance to make up for some of the time he missed with his family.
Vivi acts as Ethan’s controller for the duration of the film. The target is a man called The Wolf. His right hand man is called The Albino. Now, the last two sentences may seem like I am making a joke. I am not. Those are the actual character names, and yes The Albino happens to a bit psychotic, as if you couldn’t guess. He glares a lot at folks, crazy stuff like that.
Anyway, Ethan clearly does not like being used by Vivi but he has little choice. So he does his thing. That is to say he injures or kills a great many people in the pursuit of The Wolf. There are gun fights. There are car chases. The main impediment to his mission is clearly his illness. It’s hard to get your man when you find yourself repeatedly getting woozy at the wrong time.
Sadly, the best part of this movie is Costner’s Ethan and he isn’t permitted to shine here due to the duality of the storyline. In most movies where the mix is action and drama or action and comedy, one element tends to predominate. This film bounces the redemption story of Ethan and his family against the action story of a spy on a mission like a tennis match; back and forth, fifty percent action, fifty percent family tale. Eventually the storylines meet, as one could predict, and the inevitable climax is reached. However, by this point the whiplash from one mood and tone to another has pretty much become a major distraction.
Speaking of distractions I should mention the character of Vivi. Amber Heard plays her like she is in an entirely different movie – part femme fatale and part Bond villain. The performance could perhaps have fit the rest of the movie if it were re-tooled as an action heavy spoof. Think Hudson Hawk (1991); over the top but appropriately so.
There are several questions that the viewer has while watching this movie. I won’t list them all, just a few. Ethan is away from his family working for an extended period of time when the film opens but we never really know why that is. What caused this? Zooey is possibly attacked, in more ways than one, during one scene and it isn’t fully pursued in the following scene nor referenced during the rest of the film. Why not?
Kevin Costner in “3 Days to Kill.” Photo by Julian Torres
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The film tries very hard to serve both storylines – action and family drama – at the same time. This is a noble effort but not at all successful here. Seeing Ethan try to be a less violent man while pursuing a very violent mission certainly has its moments – he literally gets a recipe at gunpoint from a criminal to share with Zooey, for example. Ethan’s’ humanity is revealed in several scenes that are very well acted but are so disjointed from the main narrative that they also feel nonsensical at the same time.
The main actors in the film provide good work to a story that is just impossible to save. The disjointedness, the odd tonal choices, and the wholly uninspiring villains doom the film. The story primarily takes place in Paris and the location is used to great advantage. The action is very well-done. Overall it just isn’t a film you recommend to your friends. It is a wait-for-it-when-it-is-free-on-cable sort of a movie.
As I mentioned, if anyone knows action it is Besson and McG. But if they had cut 3 Days to Kill in half, simply expanding one storyline, and made it either a drama or an action movie they would have been much better off. This is not a horrid movie by any means. It just isn’t their best work.
Steven Gahm
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