Movie Muser

Co-written and produced by Luc Besson, Ethan Renner (Kevin Costner) has discovered that he’s dying and so he decides to leave his job killing terrorists for the Secret behind and go see his family in Paris, hoping to reconnect with his estranged daughter, Zooey (Hailee Steinfeld) before he meets his grace.

However his plans get complicated when Vivi (Amber Heard) contacts him about one last assignment, helping to hunt down one of the world’s most lethal terrorists – and in return he will get injections of a top secret serum that could extend his life. Ethan knows though that if his wife and daughter find out what he’s up to, he’s unlikely to be able to have any sort of relationship with either of them.

There are various bits of 3 Days To Kill that could have made for an entertaining movie, but they’re all slammed together into a mishmash of styles and ideas that comes across as a rather weird mess. For example, the parts of the movie dealing with the character drama of an estranged father and daughter working through their issues is surprisingly effective, but when jammed together with the almost sci-fi silliness of the wonder drug and James Bond villain style bad guys, it seems like two completely separate films.

In fact it’s almost as if rather coming up with the story for 3 Days To Kill, Luc Besson just shoved bits together from the various other movies he’s been involved with, from Leon to Transporter, with little thought about how they’ll fit together. Having McG at the helm doesn’t help either, as while he’s very good with individual scenes he’s never gotten the hang of creating a movie that can find a sustained tone. The result is that 3 Days To Kill suffers from many of the same issues as his previous movie, This Means War, where sections are well-made in isolation but it’s incapable of realising whether a particular scene actually fits into the movie as a whole.

Perhaps its greatest failure though is that it invests so much in its characters without realising that most of it is utterly ridiculous. The whole terrorist plot is the sort of action movie preposterousness that could have been kind of fun in a dumb way, but 3 Days To Kill doesn’t appear to realise that, even when it’s asking Kevin Costner to do utterly ludicrous things and then treating the family dynamics with an earnestness that jars horribly with the rest of the movie.

It’s a shame for Kevin Costner, as on paper both this and Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit should have been major career boosts and he’s actually pretty good in both of them. However both films were major disappointments both critically and at the box office, leaving only Man Of Steel to help reinvigorate his slightly stalled star status.

The Blu-ray includes both the Theatrical and and Extended Cut, but the latter does little except make the movie longer, which after about 90 minutes in, few people would be wishing for.

Overall Verdict: If you can overlook its inability to desire whether it’s a preposterous action movie or dead serious family drama and enjoy both sides separately, you get something out of 3 Days To Kill. But the fact it’s several different, incompatible movies jammed together into one will put most people off.

Special Features:
The Making of 3 Days to Kill
McG’s Method Featurette
Covert Operation Featurette
Theatrical Trailer

Reviewer: Tim Isaac

When photo framer Richard Dane accidentally shoots a burglar during a late-night break in, everyone is content to write the incident off as an open and shut case of self-defence. However, it’s only after the dead man’s criminal father appears and begins tormenting Dane’s family and is subsequently arrested, that it transpires there is a lot more going on than the police are telling them.

1980s retro-pulp thrillers have almost become a sub-genre in themselves, as the filmmakers who grew up on them reach the stage where they’ve gained enough influence to make their own versions. As such, Cold In July follows recent fare like Blue Ruin and Bad Country in its themes of double-crossing and vengeance.

The film is based on a novel of the same name by Joe R. Lansdale, a ridiculously prolific genre author who wrote the novella upon which cult horror Bubba Ho-Tep was based and several comic book miniseries starring anti-hero bounty hunter Jonah Hex. His writing is often bound by excess, and his 1989 tale Cold In July incorporates a particularly unpleasant urban legend that was a sickening and far more dangerous cousin to the Video Nasty scare taking place across the Atlantic around the same time. The film hews close to its source material, highlighting the ultimate absurdity of the era’s prevalent swaggering machismo that despite the best efforts of Sylvester Stallone, is in no danger of being taken seriously any more.

Audiences are likely to be most familiar with Michael C Hall as friendly neighbourhood serial killer Dexter Morgan, but family man Richard is a far less at home than the Bay Harbour Butcher when facing down ruthless thugs, the local police chief even going as far to tell him that killing someone “must have been hard for a man like you.” His vulnerability provides a counterpoint to the bluster of Don Johnson’s cowboy PI and the menace of Sam Sheperd’s sinister ex-con, imparting what little heart a violent noir mystery is capable of possessing.

Each layer of the mystery is peeled back at a measured pace, and it’s quite some time before everything is revealed and the abhorrent truth behind the lies fostered upon the protagonists is unveiled in all its morally reprehensible repugnancy, leaving only the question of what it is they’re prepared to do about it.

Overall Verdict: Director/writer team Jim Mickle and Nick Damici continue to defy categorisation, following a mutant rat-people horror, a Gothic western and a remake Mexican cannibal satire with an unapologetic throwback to a decade defined by overkill where real men are manly men, if only in the eyes of each other.

Reviewer: Andrew Marshall