![]() That’s all for the kindness, but while I have nothing bad to say about the rest of the cast who are merely taking direction, it’s easy to pinpoint how everything went so wrong. The only positive that could come out of this is that someone gives him a chance in this genre with better material to work with. Even when the film makes him unconvincingly cough through most of his dialogue and succumb to an annoying plot device that oh-so-conveniently forces our hero to collapse and hallucinate whenever he’s mere feet from the bad guys, Costner is still giving it everything he has. The guy can still act even when saddled with what has to be the stupidest character he’s played since Message in a Bottle. ![]() Even the tired one-liners that he spits (“You guys look like a couppla turds.”) come with a certain degree of world-weary panache that suggest Eastwood in his prime. Every second that he’s dispatching bad guys, even in the worst of scenes I kept wishing that he was in a better movie with this same grizzled performance. As an action hero, he’s positively charming, affable, and likeable. But he kept a promise to his ex-wife that he still has feelings for (Connie Nielsen) that he would stop working and his daughter doesn’t know that he’s a spy OR that he’s dying? What’s a recovering bad father to do?!?įirst off, before I get too angry to even finish writing this review, let me just state the film’s biggest positive: Costner. Upon his arrival, he’s stopped by a CIA spook/femme fatale (Amber Heard, who’s only there to smoke and vamp it up) who offers him an experimental drug (that induces hallucinations that only vodka can keep under control) that could prolong his life if he simply agrees to finish the job he bungled in the first place. He decides to use this time to reconnect with the teenage daughter (Hailee Steinfeld) he has been neglecting in Paris (because why would a Besson film take place anywhere else?). He’s given 3 to 5 months to live, so I guess the title is there to suggest a sense of non-existent urgency and because you just can’t call an action movie 3 to 5 Months to Go Around and Do Some Stuff. Kevin Costner plays Ethan Renner, a mid-level CIA assassin who after botching a job trying to ensnare a pair of nuclear arms dealers (one named The Albino, because duh, and the other The Wolf, because why not?) learns that he has brain and lung cancer. At least Winter’s Tale has conviction to its silliness. If you like this film, chances are it’s because you are laughing at it rather than with it, and if that’s your thing, by all means go for it. While certainly not as much of a head scratcher in terms of plotting, 3 Days to Kill manages to be worse that this year’s already intensely low water mark by not having a single original, thoughtful, or unironic bone in its body. Fast forward to less than a week later when I am watching the alarmingly misguided, horribly directed, astoundingly racist, and insanely incomprehensible McG/Luc Besson/Kevin Costner team-up 3 Days to Kill to nearly blow it out of the water. Last week when Akiva Goldsman dropped the insanely incomprehensible, pandering, and terribly uneasy Winter’s Tale, I thought the race for most alarmingly misguided and terrible studio project of the year was over early on.
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