“3 Days To Kill,” the latest in a line of euro-thrillers from Luc Besson (“The Professional”), is ushered in by McG (“Terminator: Salvation”) in the most unceremonious of ways. The film is a terse, bland and flimsy piece of work often becoming distracted by comic material and tertiary characters.
The film opens with Ethan Renner (Kevin Costner, “Man of Steel”) a gruff American C.I.A. agent on a mission to deter European bad guys, with names like the Albino and the Wolf, from doing bad things. Because this is an action movie and not a children’s book, large explosions come very quickly. Cars go boom. Guns go blam. And terrorists meet American fists.
After a botched attempt to take back some nuclear material from the Albino, Ethan eventually becomes diagnosed with an incurable form of brain cancer. He’s fired from the C.I.A., forced into retirement and then brought back out of retirement with a promise for a cure by blonde femme fatale Vivi (Amber Heard, “Syrup”), because the Wolf is back to buy more nuclear material. Again.
There’s very little to keep “3 Days to Kill” from killing itself out of general disinterest. This manifests itself in the side story of Ethan’s estranged daughter (Hailee Steinfeld, “Ender’s Game”) and his attempt to rectify old wounds by becoming a good father and a reliable husband.
If anything, “3 Days to Kill” is a prime example of Dad-ction, to coin a phrase. A film in which middle-aged sentimentality prevails often inveighing a tough guy machismo. Old men can still tell tales and Costner seems to be having fun.
Problematic, though wholly confounding is Besson’s retrograde generalizations of Europeans. The French are portrayed as conceited enjoyers of baguettes. The Italians can always be counted on for a pasta sauce recipe and Americans are cowboys who love “real football.”
It’s all the more problematic when this is a consistent thread through most of these movies from “The Family” to “From Paris with Love.” One has to wonder whether he’s laughing at himself in a bout of self-deprecation or at audiences for laughing at broad strokes of conjecture and reprising his well worn action-comedy formula for another spin.
Simply and invariably, “3 Days to Kill” proceeds at a varied pace, sometimes a bit too nodding to its belief that it’s chock full of clever material, but serviceable enough that it won’t feel like just killing time.
