3 days to kill

Director: McG
Starring: Kevin Costner, Amber Heard, Hallie Steinfeldt, Connie Nielsen
Distributor: Independent
Runtime: 117 mins. Reviewed in Mar 2014

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Rating notes: Violence, Mature Themes, Coarse language

If you have two hours to kill, you might enjoy watching three days to kill! In fact, there is an ambiguity in the title, with a father having three days to spend with his estranged daughter, and his CIA involvement in an assassination attempt.

On the whole, the film is serious in its portrait of an ageing CIA agent, discovering that he is terminally ill, and wanting out of his work in order to re-connect with his family. His assignment is very serious indeed: an arms dealer, his agent with a dirty bomb, his accountant and other associates. But then, the film also has a lot of humorous touches, especially in the agent’s trying to deal and understand his daughter who is at school in an international college in Paris. He is also benign to an agent whom he tortures but also relies on for advice about daughters. Put the two ingredients together and stir and you come up with this film.

It has been directed with flourishes by McG who made two Charlie’s Angels films a decade ago. It is based on a story by Luc Besson, who has made some classics, like Subway but who has also provided stories for quite a lot of action films including the Transporter series and a film which plays on similar themes but much less successfully, The Family with Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer.

The agent, Ethan Renner, is played by a world-weary Kevin Costner, something he does quite well and quite convincingly. When we see him in action as an assassin, we realise that he considers it just as a job and his conscience is fixed solely on American loyalty and obeying CIA orders. He is shrewd, quick into action, but at this time he has terminal cancer, only three months to live. When his contact from the US, Vivi insists that he complete the mission he began in Belgrade, with all kinds of explosions and shootings in one of the main streets, in Paris where his estranged wife and daughter live.

Audience credulity is rather strained when we see the CIA agent in charge of the mission to kill the arms dealer. Initially prim and unremarkable in her interviews with the CIA bosses, she transforms into a combination of the vamp, femme fatale, and parody of female enemies in James Bond films. She is played by Amber Heard, far too young, it would seem, to have made such progress in the CIA ranks. However, she is not plagued by any moral scruples and insists on Renner completing his work.

On the family side there is Connie Nielsen as his wife, who still loves him despite his five-year absence and his daughter, Hallie Steinfeldt, who is that the precocious stage, falling for a senior student at school, thinking that her hair do going awry is an apocalyptic disaster.

The ending relies on an enormous coincidence, but it gets the characters together in the one place, serves as an occasion for mayhem, and, with the help of a mysterious experimental drug provided by his vamp superior, Renner may actually get some extra time with his family.

Eye-catching while on the screen, but one that will fairly quickly fall out of the memory.