"Avoid, avoid, avoid.”
I posted these words on my Facebook page moments after seeing “3 Days to Kill.” I wanted to leave no room for doubt. By any of the standards by which the quality of a movie is measured, this film misses the mark more than a blind archer would miss his.
The plot: Kevin Costner plays Ethan Renner, a CIA assassin who’s dying of an incurable form of cancer that causes him to black out whenever his heart rate increases. This proves to be inconvenient during the opening scene, in which he attempts to chase down an international arms dealer but winds up in the fetal position. Helmed by McG, a competent action director, the scene promises something the rest of the movie doesn’t deliver – thrills. My first inkling that something was wrong was when the arms dealer, an inhuman, murderous pig, walks away from Ethan instead of killing him on the spot.
Had he put Costner’s character out of his misery, we would have been spared the garbage that follows. Ethan decides he wants to reconnect with his wife and daughter, from whom he’s been estranged for five years due to his work. But when he arrives in France, he finds a family of squatters living in his apartment. According to French law, he can’t kick them out until spring, so he’s stuck with them. Ethan eventually comes to care for them, which shows he has a soft heart despite being an assassin, but the whole squatter thing just comes across as an odd subplot that has no reason to be in the movie.
Ethan is met with a frosty reception as he tries to reconcile with his family, but as luck would have it, mom is leaving for London for a few days and needs a babysitter. She finally agrees to let Ethan watch their daughter, but only after he promises he’s no longer an assassin.
As luck would have it, a mysterious girl shows up and convinces Ethan to take one last job: bringing down the Wolf, the boss of the arms dealer he was pursuing in the opening scene. She offers him a lot of money for the job and something even more tempting: time with his family in the form of an experimental drug that could cure his cancer.
It all sounds very domestic: As dad tries to balance work and family, crazy hijinks ensue.
That’s right: crazy hijinks. In addition to being an action thriller and a family drama, “3 Days to Kill” wants to be a comedy. In one scene, Ethan turns a roomful of criminals into Swiss cheese; in the next, he teaches his daughter how to ride a bicycle; and in the next, he tries to hide the fact that there’s a live body in the trunk of this car as he picks up his daughter from school. Ho, ho.
The shifts in tone are frequent, and keep “3 Days to Kill” from developing any momentum. It even seems like the filmmakers forgot Ethan was on a tight timetable for taking out the Wolf because they dropped the action thriller storyline for a huge stretch of the movie to show several scenes of Coster and his daughter bonding. Teaching your child to dance is sweet, but maybe it should wait until after you take out the bad man with the dirty bomb.
“3 Days to Kill” might not sound too bad, but not only do none of the individual pieces of the movie fit with the others, they don’t work on their own. The mysterious girl is perfectly capable of killing, but she’s demoted to driver, to the point of dropping Ethan off at the scene of a hit. Never mind the debilitating effects of his cancer; he’s the ONLY ONE who can take out these thugs. Ethan doesn’t even have to investigate the arms deal; the mysterious girl tells him everything he needs to know.
The family drama is sweet but also hackneyed. I liked watching Costner in the role of a bumbling dad who tries to reunite with his rebellious daughter, but would have preferred a movie that was about that and nothing more.
In a desperate attempt by the filmmakers to tie all of the pieces of their movie together, Ethan and the Wolf wind up at the same party – because their children are revealed to be dating each other. At that point, I couldn’t wait to log on to Facebook and type “Avoid, avoid, avoid.”
One star out of four. Rated PG-13 for violence, action, sensuality, and language.