3 Days to Kill (2014)

Waste of time

It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

good back-story, and good acting

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

3 Days to Kill is a very enjoyable movie. Its is about a man who is a spy and has a sickness that causes him to leave his high risked adventures, and he tries to get a fitter relationship with his wife and his daughter. He pushed them away trying to keep them out of danger. When he gets to where his family is an undercover CIA agent follows him in order to complete her mission, and offers him to do it in exchange to get medicine for his condition that could help him live longer. She meets up with him at a market and while they are having this conversation in the vehicle the camera was up close in their faces to show that there is tension and seriousness of the situation. Once they go to the hotel and he goes to get the accountants worker there is a shooting scene and there is music that only us the audience here to further intensify the situation. There was also a scene where the body guard bends over and Ethan comes behind the door, but the camera shows neither ones faces' but shows what is happening which is than pointing a gun at the bodyguard. In the beginning of the movie when the CIA director is talking to Vivian about her mission the camera tilts at each person when they speak. This movie is a great action movie that is fun to watch with family, and even friends. if you're into action,drama, and thrillers then this is the movie i recommend for you.

I found the movie multi layered and quite poignant. It was more than just a simple western one theme and tone movie and I really enjoyed how it was put together. Kevin Costner was suitably craggy. The movie didn't insult my intelligence even if it didn't quite hang together as well as it could. That flaw was a result of the choices made to tell the story the way it was told and came off in other ways. The spy sections were clever and original while the dad arc was exceptionally well done. It's interesting it rated so highly on Netflix yet so poorly here. I'm over ridiculous action movies that take themselves too seriously. This was a beautiful combination that I thoroughly enjoyed and had me guessing minute by minute where it was headed. Refreshing and interesting.

With characters named 'The Wolf', 'The Albino', 'The Accountant', and 'The Guido', you can't expect too much quality from '3 Days To Kill', which was directed by McG (the guy who brought us the 'Charlie's Angels' movies and who at one point, wanted to cast Beyonce as Lois Lane in an abandoned remake of 'Superman' several years ago). Needless to say, McG, hasn't done anything of interest ever in his career with the exception of giving a little bit of money to television shows like 'Supernatural' and 'Chuck'.So what is '3 Days To Kill'? It's a big fat silly cliché of a movie. But it's mostly fun if you don't pay attention to ridiculous story plot or stereotypes that are on screen. Last year and this year is a big time for actor Kevin Costner. He has played a few supporting roles as of recently, which were excellent, especially in 'Man of Steel' as Pa Kent. Then we saw him in the new 'Jack Ryan' film, which was great as well. Now, he is a leading man once again, and back to his glory days as a likable yet bad ass type of guy. We've missed you Costner, and we're glad to have you back. And if this is a sign of what's to come, it will only get better from here.'3 Days To Kill' is co-written by Luc Besson of 'The Fifth Element' and 'Leon The Professional' fame. His name even appears in the opening credits above a taxi, which is a throwback to one of his earlier projects. But Besson and McG didn't want to make straight out shoot-em-up thriller. No, they wanted to make three movies in one, all of which never make any sense. They mixed a spy thriller with a silly slapstick comedy, and a coming-of-age film into two long hours without really molding a good story into it.Costner plays Ethan Renner, who is essentially a hit-man for a government agency. He even left his wife Christine (Connie Nielsen) and daughter Zoey (Hailee Steinfeld) to travel the world and take out bad guys, which he is extremely good at. When a job goes wrong, Ethan finds out he has a few months left to live, due to brain cancer. So he moves back to Paris, where his wife and daughter are now living to patch things up and spend his remaining days with them. They reluctantly accept him back on the condition that he not work for the government anymore. So all is well in the Renner household, right? Wrong.Vivi Delay (Amber Heard) shows up, always in some sort of exotic leather outfit with different hair colors to coax back Ethan in for one more job. Ethan declines, but Vivi offers him an experimental drug to cure him. He accepts the offer even though it has some crippling side-effects, which can be instantly and easily cured by drinking shots of vodka. With Ethan's wife gone for a few days on a business trip, he has a few days to kill with his daughter to catch up on lost time with her. And so the film plays out in segments with 20 minutes here and there of Ethan teaching his teenage daughter how to ride a bicycle, taking her for ice cream, and swinging on a swing set, not to mention the long talks of where he's been for the past twelve years.When we're not watching Costner play a father figure, we catch him killing the bad guys, who seem to all have scars and accents. Amber Heard's character is straight out of a Russian spy thriller movie, but only seems to show up for a few minutes during the film and never really goes anywhere. The same can be said for a family of squatters occupying Ethan's home. None of it really makes sense. However, one of the best scenes in the film is when Ethan ties up The Guido to a toilet and is about to torture him when his daughter calls his cell phone and asks for a recipe for spaghetti sauce, to which Ethan forces a frightened Guido to deliver his mother's Italian recipe over the phone.This is the type of stuff that we're dealing with in '3 Days To Kill'. The bad guys are ripped straight out of an 80s pro-American action film. Richard Sammel plays The Wolf and is as stereotypical as they come. You might recognize Sammel from Quentin Tarantino's 'Inglorious Basterds' as the German nazi soldier who got his brains bashed in by the Bear Jew. The dialogue has cheese poured all over it, but the action sequences are very well executed, despite its PG-13 rating. Costner is excellent in this as is Steinfeld and Nielsen. But Costner just carries the film as you just want to hang out with the guy on a weekly basis. Is this worth seeing in the theater? Probably not, but it's a solid movie to watch when it comes out on Netflix.

Firstly, this film is about 40 minutes too long. Even at the shorter length it would struggle to sustain the more discerning film-goers attention.Secondly, its really difficult to know how to rate it. On one level, as a badly scripted, hackneyed account of an absent, psychotic father rebuilding bridges with his emotionally troubled daughter, it scores 4. Some of the scenes are comical - Kostner finally teaches her to ride a bike after all these years. Not in some park, as normal fathers would do, but in an area the size of a postage stamp below the oh-so-scenic Sacre Coeur to a crowd of wildly applauding Parisians. You get the picture ? As an action thriller it would score less. The action, well shot in parts, revolves around a cosmic spec of dust of a plot which I won't bore you with here. Needless to say, Kostners' terminal cancer gets uncontrollable and at its' very worst when he's in (or about to get into) a one to one with a particularly nasty villain. This happens more than once but, thank goodness, he manages to get the better of it.As a comedy, it would score 1. The reason for this is that ..... it's not funny. In the slightest. The Africans living in his apartment, the trading of 'spaghetti' sauce recipes between his daughter and yet another pesky European he has to beat into submission can only,presumably, be for comic effect but are just ridiculous.Difficult to judge what it is, it's even more difficult to decide a score. Or think who it might appeal to. And who in the world spells Zoe as Zooey - no wonder the kid has problems. Nice, standard, postcard views of Paris - and some of the French villains look quite cool in their shades. I think an overall 4 is rather on the generous side. This really has little to make it worthy of your time. I'm rather annoyed that I actually sat through it all.