Movie Reviews

Luc Besson continues to give actors past their prime a leading role in movies that he is involved with. Following Robert De Niro (The Family), John Travolta (From Paris With Love) and Liam Neeson (Taken – okay, so maybe he’s the exception!), this time around it’s Kevin Costner who gets to star in 3 Days To Kill, directed by Charlie’s Angels McG.

Costner stars as Ethan, a veteran CIA hitman who finds out he only has three months left to live. So he calls it a day and sets off to reconnect with his ex-wife Christine (Connie Nielsen) and his daughter Zooey (Hailee Steinfeld). Once there he runs into a femme fatale / CIA operative named Vivi (Amber Heard) who pulls him right back in for one last mission, paying him with both cash and an experimental drug.

By combining lots of violence with a sense of humour, McG manages to turn this flick into an enjoyable guilty pleasure that has Costner leaving a trail of bodies in his wake, while trying to reestablish something of a bond with his estranged daughter. More often than not both storylines coincide, like in the scene where Ethan has to interrupt a torture session to take a phone call from his daughter who needs a good recipe for tomato sauce. Luckily his victim is Italian and willing to help out. It’s this kind of goofiness that makes 3 Days To Kill a fun movie, even if Amber Heard is a little too over the top, looking like she just wandered in from the set of Luscious Lolitas 14.