2014 has been promoted as the Comeback Year of Kevin Costner. January’s “Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit” was enjoyable, but it made no impression at the box office. Costner’s first of two sports dramas, “Draft Day”, was solid and he’s got another one coming: “McFarland” (Nov. 21). But the action/thriller/dramedy, “3 Days to Kill”, is one of the worst movies of the year.
I knew about 3-minutes in that “3 Days to Kill” was going to be a struggle. A roughly-edited boardroom scene featuring the heads of the CIA and operations agent Vivi (played by Amber Heard) leads into Costner’s Ethan Renner – a longtime top agent – coughing-up the screen. After a mission to take down a terrorist in Serbia goes poorly, Ethan learns that he has brain cancer and is going to die in 3-5 months. I’ll admit, this was the only element in the entire film I didn’t see coming (no Spoiler Alert necessary because you’re not going to see this film).
So Ethan realizes he needs to spend the little time he has left with his ex-wife and teenage daughter, who he hasn’t seen in five years. She’s played by “True Grit”‘s Hailee Steinfeld. At the same time, Vivi wants Ethan to tackle one last mission, and in return, she’ll give him an experimental drug that may extend his life. It’s a ridiculous plot, even for CIA spy mystery standards.
When 30-second montages are a film’s best quality, you know you’re in trouble. Almost nothing in “3 Days to Kill” works, which is somewhat surprising considering the extremely predictable script was co-written by Luc Besson (“Taken”, “The Family”) and the director is McG, whose “Terminator: Salvation”, was a better-than-average sci-fi effort.
And even though 2013 was “The Year of the Misguided Action Dramedy”, “3 Days to Kill” incorporates the same juvenile and bizarre attempts at humor mixed with graphic violence that were so common last year. And the result is the same. Costner tries his best to save every scene he’s in (which is most of them) – but can’t, while Heard is simply trying to act – but can’t. Her Vivi is a laughably bad character – the tough, female killer, with a different outfit and hairstyle every time she pops-up on screen to simply try to keep the audience’s attention. It doesn’t work.
But the worst part of “3 Days to Kill” is the clumsy audio re-dubbing. And it has nothing to do with foreign-speaking characters. Throughout the film characters are reciting dialogue that doesn’t match-up to the movement of their lips. I laughed-out loud several times during one conversation between Ethan and Vivi inside a car that was clearly re-recorded later in a booth, which is fine, but there’s a little issue of matching-up the words and the lips in post-production that the technical team forgot about. Sloppy filmmaking.
“3 Days to Kill” is rated PG-13 for some action/violence, brief adult content and language. This isn’t even worth your time if you have 2 hours to kill and you’ve seen everything else.
On The Official LCJ Report Card, “3 Days to Kill” gets a D.