Almost nothing works in 3 Days to Kill. Here’s what the movie felt like: Aging hitman Kevin Costner reluctantly kills someone. Then he feels bad about killing that person. Then he says to every person he meets: “Teenage daughters, you know?” Repeat.
The movie tries to split its time between Costner’s hits—edited incoherently to obtain a PG-13—and trying to reconnect with his teenage daughter. She’s played by Hailee Steinfeld, who continues to prove that True Grit was probably a fluke. The movie never strikes the right balance. If Luc Besson were actually directing this, he could pull it off. As a writer only, whose script is in the hands of McG in pure director-for-hire mode, whatever the point was got lost in translation.
After a job goes wrong in Bulgaria, and learning he only has months to live, Costner resurfaces in Paris, hoping to reconnect with his wife (Connie Nielsen) and daughter. Then, of course, the CIA shows up to ask him for “one last job.” Amber Heard plays the femme fatale handler and offers up the one thing a man dying of cancer could possibly want: a cure. That the CIA has a quick-acting cure for cancer is only the fifth or sixth most implausible thing in this movie.
Its biggest problem is tonal inconsistency. In one scene, Costner saves his daughter from being gang-raped and then literally, in the very next scene, he’s teaching her how to ride a bike. Did no one think this juxtaposition would be completely confusing? Another example: Costner tortures the bad guy’s limo driver with a car battery, then keeps him around so he can ask him parenting advice.
Plus, while Costner is semi-believable as a crack shot, he’s less believable as an all-purpose killer. A shootout in a bakery turns into a fistfight and features some of the most unconvincing stuntwork I’ve ever seen. There’s no way that was Kevin Costner flipping over table or being choked out by an assassin. Also, I’m sorry, but even if you’re wearing a bulletproof vest, you’re not just going to get up quickly after taking a shotgun blast to the chest.
Deadpan humor is not Costner’s forte either. Liam Neeson can pull this kind of dialogue off, but Costner appears completely uncomfortable dropping a one-liner. So if a movie has poor action and poor comedy, what’s left? The father-daughter stuff and that’s only slightly better than awful. There’s also a subplot where African squatters have overtaken Costner’s apartment and since it’s against the law to make them leave in winter, he learns to be part of their family. That felt utterly disingenuous.
By trying to cram all this into less than two hours, 3 Days to Kill comes up as a big zero.
