3 Days to Kill Review
3 days? How about 113 minutes that felt like 3 days?
Image courtesy of the 3 Days to Kill Official Site
I am experiencing a weird phenomenon with writer/director Luc Besson. Up until a few years ago I would have told you I am a Luc Besson fan. The Fifth Element, Taken, and the Professional used to rank up in my favorite films.
Unfortunately as each of his more recent projects comes out my love and respect for him drops by another considerable margin. It started with Columbiana and kept going with Taken 2 and the Family. My best friend still holds that any director only has three good movies in him or her and should bow out after the third and I can’t disagree with him.
The weird part is the disappointment and bitterness I feel towards his new movies is bleeding backwards and staining my enjoyment of the few movies I like. I don’t think I can watch the Professional now and not see how ridiculous Gary Oldman is, or how dumb Leon’s war cry in the apartment sounds. A cop wipes out an entire family and there are no repercussions? How about the fact that Liam Neeson took the Intensometer so far into the red that it has come around like a watch second hand in Taken?
Of course I could never watch the Fifth Element without laughing at it’s campyness, but now that I see what his typical movie is like I strongly suspect that the camp elements of that film were the result of incompetent direction rather than intentional fun. Now the laughter is laced with tears.
I guess it’s fair to say Luc Besson’s talent and career are in the final stages of a death spiral and when you hit rock bottom it is inevitable that you meet up with the dregs of Hollywood, specifically my old favorite punching bag McG. This is the perfect storm of bad movie teamups; a once talented writer and director who seems to be suffering from some form of talent dementia and a man who is to Hollywood what mercury is to tuna fish.
The mystery of McG is one that defies description. All of his movies have sucked, and for the most part what he does best is mediocre television. I watched Chuck for a while before getting painfully bored (really I only watched it to see Jayne in a suit) and Supernatural, which got a lot better after McG left. I refuse to watch the O.C. (I grew up in Orange County. No one down there calls it the O.C. and as far as trite pretentious bull goes I don’t have to watch a show about it. I lived it). Yet in spite of this, his refusal to use vowels, and his massive ego (the letters McG showed up on the opening credits about 14 times. “McG studios and McG presents a McG production” etc.) studios keep handing him budgets. It’s almost as if there is an unspoken agreement to produce a certain number of craptastic movies in order to make the good ones look better and McG is their go to guy (actually now that I think about all the crime-against-cinema movies that issue forth from Hollywood like pus from an infected wound that is not the dumbest theory I have ever come up with).
Personally I developed a real hatred of McG when he ruined Terminator but his “movie” This Means War didn’t help. Good Terminator image courtesy of the movie tshirt category.
At the top of the laundry list of failures this movie contains is the fact that McG can’t seem to maintain a tone (something I also noticed in Luc Besson’s The Family, so maybe it’s not all McG). It is equal parts action spy movie, erotic femme fatale, teenage girl angst, and cheesy family love story. I’m not saying that all films have to maintain a tone but shifts in tone need to be for a purpose, NOT the random changing of channels by a remote control in the hands of an epileptic having the mother of all fits. At any given moments you could be watching Kevin Costner shoot any number of guys, torture somebody, hang out in a strip club with his CIA director/latex bondage queen, have a tender moment with his estranged wife, or get into an argument with his teenage daughter and the shifts come with the randomness of Bingo balls. Doing a successful shift in tone requires directing, a commodity in short supply in this film.
The other thing about this film really being four separate films is that each of the sub films sucks horribly too. The spy/action part of the film seems to boil down to “shoot everyone and/or torture everyone”. The femme fatale is so laughably out of place and cartoonish she is like a kids pencil drawing of a penis hung on the wall next to the Mona Lisa in the Louvre. The teenage girl’s angst is so hamhanded and trite it wouldn’t survive as an after school special, and the family drama so bizarre and fake you have to wonder if Luc and McG actually grew up in a family or were created in some lab somewhere and raised by feeder tubes. Each part of this film is worthy of a separate blistering review but really I only have so much time.
One more thing before I get into the story. Something I have noticed that seems to be a common thread for all Luc Besson and MgG joints is they both seem to believe that the CIA is some kind of God like creation that can kill anyone they like and reign havoc across the world with impunity. While this may or may not be true the problem is when you show them going into mass shootings in other countries such as France (well known for letting American spy organizations do whatever the hell they want) and don’t show any kind of repercussions the reality of the film starts to fragment. Showing even the slightest bit of an attempt at spin control when an entire floor of a crowded hotel gets blown to bits would keep a film such as this (already on it’s last threads realistically) from looking like I wrote it back in Jr. High for a Top Secret campaign (there’s a test of your geek-fu).
I better get on with it. The film starts with Agent Vivi DeLay (Amber Heard-Zombieland, Drive Angry, Pineapple Express) of the CIA in very conservative business suit (my mentioning of this will become relevant shortly) being briefed about her next target. She is supposed to kill a bad guy named “the Wolf”. He apparently makes it his business to sell radioactive material to terrorists for dirty bombs (My eyes rolled at that one. What’s the matter Luc? Was that really the most evil thing you could think of? How about in your next film you make it about a guy who kidnapps children and grinds them up into hamburger meat?). He is supposed to be selling a bomb through his lieutenant “the Albino” (the code names are so dopey I’m going to keep on putting them in quotes to drive home the ironic point). Somehow they know where the buy is going to happen, what is being sold, when, and for how much but have no idea what “the Wolf” looks like.
She travels to the hotel where CIA Agent Ethan Renner (Kevin Costner-Waterworld, Dances with Wolves, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit) is there to kill guys for her or something. He needs to call his daughter for her birthday and is sick. “The Albino” recognizes one of the other CIA women and the whole deal goes kablooy. Ethan manages to shoot “the Albino” in the leg while pursuing him but passes out from his sickness, letting “the Albino” get away. He wakes in a hospital bed and is told he has cancer and only a few months to live.
He quits the CIA and heads back to Paris where his wife and daughter live. He finds a family of racist stereotypes squatting in his apartment and after establishing himself as the Alpha male (with the help of his gun) opts to let them live there for a while (oh, yeah. At parts the film shifts over into the Haitian Brady Bunch. Hilarious). He goes to see his ex wife Christine (Connie Nielsen-One Hour Photo, Gladiator, The Devil’s Advocate). He tells her he is dying but doesn’t want to tell his daughter because…honestly I have no idea and I don’t think McG did either. Maybe they think a sudden death is better for a teenage kid to absorb.
Anyway he picks up his daughter Zoey (Hailee Steinfeld-True Grit, Enders Game, She’s a Fox) at school. She hasn’t seen Ethan in like 10 years or something (or maybe he had visited. The nature of Ethan and Zoeys relationship was ill defined at best. Keeping the audience informed of relevant character details is apparently not in McG’s job description) and is understandably pissed off at him. She has grown up into an extra from Mean Girls and all around annoyance.
At that point Vivi resurfaces looking like she just got off her night job as a dominatrix (the change up was really off putting. I spent the first 10 minutes not really sure if it was the girl from the beginning of the film) and wants Ethan to help her. She believes that Ethan saw “the Wolf” at the bomb buy and wants him to help her kill him (I guess the CIA doesn’t bother to hire sketch artists or uses mug shots). She offers him an experimental drug that will magically cure his cancer but also makes him hallucinate and pass out whenever his heart rate increases. Good thing he never does anything like get into a gun fight or have to chase bad guys through most of Paris.
Oh, wait he does. In spite of the fact that he has a medical condition that makes him painfully unqualified to do “wet work” she has him agree to kill “the Wolf”, “the Albino”, and ten other random jackoffs. At that point the shifting of tones goes from every few minutes to putting all the raw footage into a blender and hitting puree. Zoey really starts to cramp his style. Every time he is about to kill some hapless bodyguard or attach jumper cables to the nipples of a car rental service owner who respects his clients privacy she calls him with her “hilarious” pop music ringtone. Meanwhile he keeps on loosing his ability to remain conscious every time bullets start flying.
That’s the movie in a nutshell. I hated this film so I am going to drop a ton of spoilers but in case you really think you are going to be surprised SPOILER ALERT. He catches up to “the Albino” and “the Wolf” just in time to pass out but instead of just killing him like anyone who had ever seen any James Bond film ever would “the Albino” puts him in a position where Ethan can easily reverse things and kill him. It turns out “the Wolf” is friends and business associates with the parents of Zoey’s boyfriend so the final gun fight can occur at a party where his family is around. Christine gets pissed off at Ethan for working for the CIA when he said he quit. Oh, yeah. The drug cures his cancer in like a week (what was it, like super chemotherapy? Also why did they transport it in a leather pen case? Not exactly hygienic).
The stars.
Meh. I still like Kevin Costner, although he sort of phoned this one in. One star. Some of the gun fights were pretty good, although if you have seen the Professional you have already seen them. One star. Is that it? I guess so. Two stars.
The black holes.
One for each of the crappy movies that were sewn together into this Frankestein. Four black holes. No tone, and tonal shifts that played out like having sex with a hot girl while her ex boyfriend holds the control to your shock collar. One black hole. A bonus hole for having a professional spy think the way to keep a low profile would be to dress like one of the The Merovingian’s henchmen from the Matrix Revolutions. One black hole. The only character that seemed remotely real was Ethan, and his realism made all the rest of them that much more laughable surreal. One black hole. Poor editing and pacing. One black hole. Another movie where the title has little to nothing to do with the actual film. There was no clock or pressing time requirement in the story. It is obvious they came up with it post production when the studio shot down the more functional title “McG Pleasures Himself all over the Audience” (I assume). One black hole. Overall an attempt at glitz and glam over substance that managed to fail to glitz or glam the audience. A general failure. Two black holes. Total: eleven black holes.
So nine black holes. Pretty lame IMO. Should you see it? Probably not, unless you really, really, really want to be brainlessly entertained and your only other option is staring at a wall. With the right mix of drugs and/or alcohol you might be able to enjoy it. Probably drunk off your ass is the best way to see it. Nothing screams big screen to watch in the comfort of your single wide with a box of your finest wine. Date movie? Naw. There is nothing here to encourage a girl to take off her clothes. Bathroom break? There is a bonding scene towards the last half wherein Ethan teaches Zoey how to ride a bike (at age 16) that drags on for like 100 years (or so it seamed). Who says McG can’t do family drama?
Thanks for reading. I saw Pompeii last night and will write it up tomorrow. Follow me on Twitter @Nerdkungfu. Feel free to leave comments here on this film or my review and off topic questions, suggestions, or fan mail (I almost managed to type that last one without bursting out laughing) can be sent to [email protected]. Have a great night and I will talk to you soon.
Dave
