At first glance, 3 Days to Kill seems to do for Kevin Costner what Taken did for Liam Neeson. It casts the veteran actor in an action role, placing him as a highly skilled, no-nonsense secret agent traipsing around Paris doing harm to a variety of bad guys. But while the movies look similar, 3 Days to Kill doesn’t have nearly as much velocity. It runs twenty minutes longer, the film more prone to Hollywood sentimentality than the prior movie. In the end, it suffers from a clash of tones that’s never quite resolved.
Veteran CIA agent Ethan Renner (Kevin Costner) has just learned that he has a terminal disease. He moves back to Paris, hoping to reconnect with his estranged wife Christine (Connie Nielsen) and teenage daughter Zoey (Hailee Steinfeld). But his attention becomes split when the mysterious Vivi (Amber Heard) makes him an offer. In exchange for his services tracking down an international terrorist, she will give him an experimental drug that could cure his illness. Ethan then tries to juggle dismantling a criminal organization and being a father to Zoey.
The movie itself tries to juggle those two priorities. About half of it is composed of chase scenes, fight sequences and bits where Ethan interrogates a tied-up flunky in the bathroom of his rundown Paris apartment. And the other half is made up of scenes of the father bonding with his teenage daughter. It’s an awkward fit at best. There is an inherent incompatibility between the sunset-lit scenes of Ethan teaching his teenage daughter how to ride a bike and the dark comedy of the violence that he inflicts on other people.
It’s hard to buy into the film’s sweetness when the main character had just been electrocuting someone. The film might have worked better if it wasn’t so intent on keeping the two sides separate. Zoey would have made a much more interesting character if she became part of Ethan’s dirty work, if father and daughter had instead bonded over inflicting pain on others. The funniest bits of the film actually come close to that idea, with one of Ethan’s victims forced to share a spaghetti sauce recipe to Zoey under threat of bodily harm.
The film’s action is competently handled. A lot of the violence happens offscreen, but Kevin Costner is always able to sell the threat of his character. Costner plays grizzled veteran better than almost anyone at this point, his face simply implying the decades of experience. Hailee Steinfeld is fine as his teenage daughter, though I feel her talents could have been better used. True Grit showed that the actress is capable of much more than playing the average teenager. It would have been interesting to see some of her edge.
3 Days to Kill is generally missing its edge. It doesn’t have the efficiency or the economy of Taken, or its willingness to subvert expectations. It basically expands the worst parts of Taken, the parts where the hero isn’t out on a quest to inflict harm on other people. The action is pretty good when it’s happening, these sequences more than ably directed. But it shares time with the forced dramatics of this father and daughter relationship. There is a place for sweetness, and it isn’t in here.
My Rating:
