Luc Besson, the most provocative of guilty pleasures when he’s on his game, wrote 3 Days To Kill’s story, co-wrote its screenplay, and produced. The film’s campy violence marks a return to form for Besson while it also heralds a continuation of a renaissance in the acting career of Kevin Costner begun with the TV series Hatfields and McCoys. This equal-parts preposterous and impressive new film may not exactly be Besson’s La Femme Nikita or Costner’s Bull Durham, but as entertainment for this winter doldrums period goes, it’s not shabby.
Secure within its framework of cartoonish action film, 3 Days To Kill pours it on heavy. Just when it seems to get into trouble with yet another cliche or still another manipulation, the savvy delivery of its schmaltz spoofs its own conformity, acknowledges its own buffoonery. No overkill is too over the top here. Waiting for things to get more ridiculous? It’s just around the corner. As you get ready to roll your eyes, your raised eyebrows prevent it.
Costner, often too sick to stay on his feet, keeps mowing down villains. The trailer says he’s a spy. Don’t let that fool you. He’s Ethan Renner, a dying CIA assassin whose unknowing and unforgiving estranged teenage daughter, Zooey, sets his ringtone announcing her calls to the “I Don’t Care” chorus from Icona Pop’s “I Love It.” Violence-interruptus becomes a running theme, as Costner pauses to talk to Zooey (Hailee Steinfeld, True Grit) while in mid-torture of an informant or when approaching the hideaway of his target, The Wolf, a nasty terrorist.
Like the best action movie heroes Ethan stays so calm that, like his ringtone, he really doesn’t care either. He seems downright bored right up until he puts a villain’s head in a hot waffle maker, rips a guy’s body hair off with duct tape, or plants a bullet into the foot of a security guard who won’t let him into a nightclub to check on his daughter’s safety. He’s got three months to live after a tough medical diagnosis and promises his estranged wife (Connie Neilsen) he’ll quit working in order to spend his remaining time with his daughter. Then he gets lured back into killing by foxy young agent Vivi Delay (Amber Heard, complete with stiletto heels and long eyelashes) who draws him with an “experimental cancer therapy,” which she herself injects into him with a foot-long needle. There are illogical gun battles, exaggerated jokes about “albinos,” mindless send-ups of the French, riding lessons on Montmartre, and a silly family of Sudanese squatters inhabiting Ethan’s long-vacant Paris apartment. You may find it all dull and ludicrous for all I know. Myself, I mostly laughed my ass off.