3 Days to Kill

Dir. McG, Starring: Kevin Costner, Amber Beard, Hailee Steinfeld and Connie Nielsen. Paris is always a terrific setting for any film, so finding 3 Days to Kill set in the city of lights was particularly fun. The story is preposterous, gimmicky and almost unintentionally funny at times but it is also thrilling, entertaining, sometimes humorous and chock-full of eye candy. Costner plays a CIA agent who is diagnosed with a terminal illness with a deadly, 3 or 4 month life-limit. Amber Beard, a fetching CIA agent assigned to capture a German criminal planning to sell nuclear materials, hires the reluctant Costner with the promise of an experimental drug-cure as a lure. Complicating matters is Costner's estrangement from his daughter, played by Hailee Steinfeld and wife--Connie Nielsen--unfinished business from his past he intends to rectify. The action scenes are expertly directed and Costner makes a very watchable and credible bad-ass CIA agent. Costner is enjoying a resurgence in movies again after a long dormant period and his presence here helps tether the film's far-fetched developments to some sort of shaky premise. Steinfeld is the standard, pouty, movie teen; angry with Costner for being an absentee parent. The role doesn't allow her the quirky charm she exhibited in True Grit; which is too bad. Connie Nielsen fares a little better as the wife frustrated with her husband's dangerous, shadowy work but she too is given little to do. The villains are mostly serviceable baddies, sometimes even anachronistically stereotypical. An Italian accountant named Guido (a better name wasn't available?) talks and behaves like a lazy screenwriter's conception of a Sicilian while the principal villian-The Wolf-is German, which was probably the screenplay's only description of him. Amber Beard's character is scarcely believable as a CIA field-agent. Speeding around Paris in a sports car seems like just the kind of attention-getting behaviour a covert agency would abhor and is a risible breach of logic. And how many CIA agents are dressed stylishly in black leather; strikingly fashionable and sexy? Again, wouldn't this style of dress be spectacularly much for an CIA agent? May as well walk the Parisian fashion runways. And why doesn't she just shoot the Wolf herself in the Paris metro after Costner is incapacitated by the experimental drug's side-effects? Men like myself will shrug and overlook the aforementioned because Beard is lovely to behold. The film manages to be pleasing in spite of itself. If you find yourself smiling when you exit the theater, it could be a symptom of two reactions: 1) the film is satisfying or 2) the implausibilities are just too comical to ignore. Either way, there are worse ways to spend an afternoon.