3 Days to Kill (2014)

If you have had a chance to cheat death at the risk of losing the time you had left, would you take it? In February 2014, Ethan weighed his odds and made a decision.

Directing this 117 minute action/crime/drama/thriller is McG.

Killing time in this flick is: Kevin Costner as Ethan Renner, Amber Heard as Vivi Delay, Hailee Steinfeld as Zoey Renner, Connie Nielsen as Christine Renner, Marc Andreoni as Mitat Yilmaz, Tomas Lemarquis as The Albino, Richard Sammel as The Wolf and Eriq Ebouaney as Jules.

Ethan is a CIA agent that has spent more time at work than at home with his family. Now, after all those years it’s cost him a relationship with his daughter. That’s something that Ethan wants to try and change after receiving news that he doesn’t have long to live. With only a few months left, Ethan wants to spent it with his family, if he can. After not being around that much in the past, you can’t just expect to jump right back in without a little struggle. All Ethan wants is more time to work things out. So when he’s given an offer to try a experimental drug that might save his life, of course he wants it. Unfortunately, the price is going back to do the job that cost him his family in the first place. One more job… for a maybe cure… Just a little longer in the field and he could have a lifetime with the family, that is, if the drug even works.

It’s been a few since I’ve seen Costner leading in a movie… yep, been awhile. I can’t say this one was the “action thrill ride” I was expecting. Now while it has a pretty good playthrough, the story is a little odd. I kept seeing reminders of other films, and I don’t know if that was intentional or if the script was randomly generated and it was all just happenstance. Yet because of a few scenes I was taking back to a couple of older but really good films, like American Flyers (1985) and The Bodyguard (1992). Even though the script tried to “Crank” it up a bit, with it’s PG-13 rating it’s sort of light with the violence. Yeah, we still get the shootouts and fights, but not the gore we’ve seen in other action flicks. Really you don’t even notice, which is kind of cool.

The cast does great, and yeah, Costner still has leading star skills. Now the down side to this one is that between trying to play the badass CIA agent, and the father that wants to be there for his kid. These two intertwined story lines at times give it kind of, well an almost comedic playthrough and breaks the suspension of disbelief. The more I watched the movie, the more It just seemed like some weird amalgamation of films… or maybe it was just me.