3 Days To Kill (Cinema Screening)

(Spoilers)

From the off I was certain that 3 Days To Kill would not be received well, the trailers said it all really. However I am generally quite easy to please with this genre of action, and I often enjoy movies that the majority of film fans don’t. A Good Day To Die Hard and Taken 2 are good examples of this so I thought 3 Days To Kill could join this crowd of rejected action movies, unfortunately I am with everyone else this time. 3 Days To Kill was awful.

I was lulled into a false sense of security to start with though as I really enjoyed the opening sequence and thought it was a solid start that could be built on to create a great action flick, it was a shame that the film just continually spiraled downhill after this. There are several issues with 3 Days To Kill. The first is that the main action star Kevin Costner plays a character (Ethan) who is sick and has in fact been given months to live. The result of this meant that his character could hardly complete any action scenes, this is not what action fans want to see. Badass ‘Taken’ style destruction is what we want to see instead what we get here is the main character blacking out on no less than 3 occasions being unable to complete the scene, it had a similar feel to Godzilla when they would cut away from a fight scene – it was always disappointing and quickly became frustrating. Now I really like Kevin Costner and thought he was a great choice for an action flick however it is just his character limitations that stop him from delivering. The opening sequence and one car chase were really the only highlights of this movie, more scenes like this and 3 Days To Kill would have been easily enjoyable.

The second problem is this, 3 Days To Kill isn’t really an action film it is predominantly a film about family drama. 3 Days To Kill focuses in on the relationship between Ethan and his daughter Zooey. This is overkill though as unlike Taken where there is a couple of scenes at the start which give context to the back story and relationships 3 Days to Kill develops this plot point and really brings it to the forefront of the movie. Easily its biggest mistake as it is not done well, being cringy and unoriginal at every turn. If it isn’t bad enough that Ethan teaches his daughter to ride a bike in one scene, a couple later he then teaches her to dance as well! I couldn’t deal with this and for the surprisingly long running time of 2 hours there was a distinct lack of action. Instead McG (director) chose to fill it with this mind-numbingly boring storyline of Father and daughter which everyone already knew the outcome to. Unfortunately this isn’t where the problems stop for 3 Days To Kill, the constant failure at humour quickly became embarrassing and the character of Vivi just made no sense at all and was clearly just inserted so that there was a female character who could show a bit of flesh, this was cheap and detracted quality from the film at an alarming rate. Her development had the exact opposite effect of what was most likely the intention.

All in all 3 Days To Kill had its focus all wrong and then when it finally gave us what we wanted they mucked that up too by making their lead character terminally ill so being unable to complete the action that we wanted to see. I can’t understand how the makers of this film were so blind in their production of such a poor film. I wanted to like this movie, and usually when this is the case I can find things to like in it and make a case for it. With 3 Days To Kill I struggle to say anything that’s positive.

BIGGEST FLAW – Wrong focus

BIGGEST ACHIEVEMENT – Great opening sequence

Rating – 2.5/10