Is dad a badass?

3 Days to Kill

(2014)

Costner riding the crest of… well, being sucked up by a twister in Man of Steel, I guess, ploughs his comeback trail by going all Liam Neeson on the arses of various Eurotrash types. Luc Besson’s formula cheapie action vehicles have scored one great success (Taken) and one moderate one (Transporter). 3 Days to Kill won’t be following them into franchise territory, but it’s actually a lot of fun.

McG, asking for trouble by saddling himself with a nickname, was even less appreciated by the dubious after he decided to take on the Terminator franchise. I don’t especially mind his hyperactive flash, though. He can stage a decent action scene, and he’s considerably less stomach churning than the equally derided Brett Ratner. McG’s last movie, This Means War, was fairly awful, lumbered with an unfunny script and a trio of leads with zero chemistry. Here, equipped with the latest of Besson’s ten or twelve annual screenplays, the results are closer to the familial funnies of The Family than the dopey deadpan of Taken.

Costner’s game, and as CIA assassin Ethan Renner he learns he has three months to live. So Ethan moves to France to be close to his estranged family (gorgeous Connie Nielsen is his wife, and Hailee Steinfeld his petulant daughter). Instead of cuddly toys, out-of-touch pater buys Zooey a purple bicycle (shades of Taken there). Meanwhile, he finds a family of squatters camped in his flat and is offered a lifeline by CIA superior Vivi (Amber Heard); an experimental drug in return for his killing arms dealer the Wolf (and his dodgy assistant

the Albino).

There’s an effective comedy trail of incongruity here. Costner is continually interrupted mid job by his daughter’s teeny bop ringtone, usually during the torture (it’s the CIA way, just live with it) of some unfortunate (frequently Marc Andreoni as Mitat, with whom Ethan swops parental tips). It’s the same sort of play of contrasts we saw in The Family (ultra violence versus domesticity) and I have to admit it also frequently tickled me there. Dad offering his daughter advice on how best to hit someone at school, particularly coming from Costner in slightly irked mode, is quite winning.

Added to this McG stages his action effectively, from a fight in a butcher’s shop, to a gas masked attack on the Wolf’s convoy, to daddy rescuing his daughter in a nightclub (the closest this gets to Neeson-esque angry pops, although Costner trumps him by casually shooting a bouncer in the foot to gain entrance). He also embraces the chance to show Ethan’s drug-addled point-of-view (the device of Ethan pegging out at a crucial moment is leant on maybe one time too many, however).

True, the family stuff is never actually affecting or meaningful, and scenes such as dad teaching Zooey to dance make you choke up in the wrong sense, but for every scene like that there’s another where Zooey is given a pasta sauce recipe by one of Ethan’s torture victims, who is at gun point on the other end of the phone.

Amber Heard, both in terms of the character she plays and her casting, doesn’t work. She’s completely ridiculous, almost as if McG had been watching Sex and Death 101 and The President’s Analyst back-to-back and decided to mash them together in a constantly costume-changing spymaster with a nymphomaniac/ sadistic bent. The character is too broad, and Heard doesn’t have the chops to pull her off, but it does peg the movie as one ready and willing to embrace the absurd.

Richard Sammel (one of the very best things’ in Guillermo del Toro’s lousy The Strain) makes a good villain, and Tomas Lemarquis makes a good henchman (with a thing for decapitation). There’s a fantastic reveal scene towards the end that could have pushed the climax in an entirely different direction (of the cat-and-mouse, battle of wits variety). It would have been more in keeping with the two-tone picture as a whole. Instead the makers opt to shoot the shit out of everything, which is still engaging, but a lost opportunity.

Mostly this is a lot of fun, and well-played. Costner’s never been a consistent action star, although he’s quite accomplished (he can hold a gun with conviction and poise), and it’s a nice change to see him do this between all the many sports movies he has to fit in during his career second wind. 3 Days to Kill is also a good reminder that he has an able light touch as a comedy actor. And that he has a marginally better wigmaker than Nicolas Cage.

Comments

Prepare the Heathen’s Stand! By order of purification!

Apostle (2018)
(SPOILERS) Another week, another undercooked Netflix flick from an undeniably talented director. What’s up with their quality control? Do they have any? Are they so set on attracting an embarrassment of creatives, they give them carte blanche, to hell with whether the results are any good or not? Apostle's an ungainly folk-horror mashup of The Wicker Man (most obviously, but without the remotest trace of that screenplay's finesse) and any cult-centric Brit horror movie you’d care to think of (including Ben Wheatley's, himself an exponent of similar influences-on-sleeve filmmaking with Kill List), taking in tropes from Hammer, torture porn, and pagan lore but revealing nothing much that's different or original beyond them.

She writes Twilight fan fiction.

Vampire Academy (2014)
My willingness to give writer Daniel Waters some slack on the grounds of early glories sometimes pays off (Sex and Death 101) and sometimes, as with this messy and indistinct Young Adult adaptation, it doesn’t. If Vampire Academy plods along as a less than innovative smart-mouthed Buffy rip-off that might be because, if you added vampires to Heathers, you would probably get something not so far from the world of Joss Whedon. Unfortunately inspiration is a low ebb throughout, not helped any by tepid direction from Daniel’s sometimes-reliable brother Mark and a couple of hopelessly plankish leads who do their best to dampen down any wit that occasionally attempts to surface.

I can only presume there’s a never-ending pile of Young Adult fiction poised for big screen failure, all of it comprising multi-novel storylines just begging for a moment in the Sun. Every time an adaptation crashes and burns (and the odds are that they will) another one rises, hydra-like, hoping…

There's something wrong with the sky.

Hold the Dark (2018)
(SPOILERS) Hold the Dark, an adaptation of William Giraldi's 2014 novel, is big on atmosphere, as you'd expect from director Jeremy Saulnier (Blue Ruin, Green Room) and actor-now-director (I Don’t Want to Live in This World Anymore) pal Macon Blair (furnishing the screenplay and appearing in one scene), but contrastingly low on satisfying resolutions. Being wilfully oblique can be a winner if you’re entirely sure what you're trying to achieve, but the effect here is rather that it’s "for the sake of it" than purposeful.

You can’t just outsource your entire life.

Tully (2018)
(SPOILERS) A major twist is revealed in the last fifteen minutes of Tully, one I'll happily admit not to have seen coming, but it says something about the movie that it failed to affect my misgivings over the picture up to that point either way. About the worst thing you can say about a twist is that it leaves you shrugging.

Outstanding. Now, let’s bite off all the heads and pile them up in the corner.

Venom (2018)
(SPOILERS) A 29% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes can't be wrong, can it? To go by the number of one-star reviews Sony’s attempt to kick-start their own shred of the Marvel-verse has received, you’d think it was the new Battlefield Earth, or Highlander II: The Quickening. Fortunately, it's far from that level of ignominy. And while it’s also a considerable distance from showing the polish and assuredness of the official Disney movies, it nevertheless manages to establish its own crudely winning sense of identity.

Well, you did take advantage of a drunken sailor.

Tomb Raider (2018)
(SPOILERS) There's evidently an appetite out there for a decent Tomb Raider movie, given that the lousy 2001 incarnation was successful enough to spawn a (lousy) sequel, and that this lousier reboot, scarcely conceivably, may have attracted enough bums on seats to do likewise. If we're going to distinguish between order of demerits, we could characterise the Angelina Jolie movies as both pretty bad; Tomb Raider, in contrast, is unforgivably tedious.

If you want to have a staring contest with me, you will lose.

Phantom Thread (2017)
(SPOILERS) Perhaps surprisingly not the lowest grossing of last year's Best Picture Oscar nominees (that was Call Me by Your Name) but certainly the one with the least buzz as a genuine contender, subjected as Phantom Thread was to a range of views from masterpiece (the critics) to drudge (a fair selection of general viewers). The mixed reaction wasn’t so very far from Paul Thomas Anderson's earlier The Master, and one suspects the nomination was more to do with the golden glow of Daniel Day-Lewis in his first role in half a decade (and last ever, if he's to be believed) than mass Academy rapture with the picture. Which is ironic, as the relatively unknown Vicky Krieps steals the film from under him.

The whole thing should just be your fucking nose!

A Star is Born (2018)
(SPOILERS) A shoe-in for Best Picture Oscar? Perhaps not, since it will have to beat at very least Roma and First Man to claim the prize, but this latest version of A Star is Born still comes laden with more acclaim than the previous three versions put together (and that's with a Best Picture nod for the 1937 original). While the film doesn't quite reach the consistent heights suggested by the majority of critics, who have evacuated their adjectival bowels lavishing it with superlatives, it's undoubtedly a remarkably well-made, stunningly acted piece, and perhaps even more notably, only rarely feels like its succumbing to just how familiar this tale of rise to, and parallel fall from, stardom has become.

Yes, cake is my weakness.

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017)
(SPOILERS) Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is good fun, and sometimes, that’s enough. It doesn’t break any new ground, and the establishing act is considerably better than the rather rote plotting and character development that follows, but Jake Kasdan’s semi-sequel more than justifies the decision to return to the stomping ground of the tepid 1995 original, a movie sold on its pixels, and is comfortably able to coast on the selling point of hormonal teenagers embodying grown adults.

This is by some distance Kasdan’s biggest movie, and he benefits considerably from Gyula Pados’s cinematography. Kasdan isn’t, I’d suggest, a natural with action set pieces, and the best sequences are clearly prevized ones he’d have little control over (a helicopter chase, most notably). I’m guessing Pados was brought aboard because of his work on Predators and the Maze Runners (although not the lusher first movie), and he lends the picture a suitably verdant veneer. Wh…

I take Quaaludes 10-15 times a day for my "back pain", Adderall to stay focused, Xanax to take the edge off, part to mellow me out, cocaine to wake me back up again, and morphine... Well, because it's awesome.

The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
Along with Pain & Gain and The Great Gatsby, The Wolf of Wall Street might be viewed as the completion of a loose 2013 trilogy on the subject of success and excess; the American Dream gone awry. It’s the superior picture to its fellows, by turns enthralling, absurd, outrageous and hilarious. This is the fieriest, most deliriously vibrant picture from the director since the millennium turned. Nevertheless, stood in the company of Goodfellas, the Martin Scorsese film from which The Wolf of Wall Street consciously takes many of its cues, it is found wanting.

I was vaguely familiar with the title, not because I knew much about Jordan Belfort but because the script had been in development for such a long time (Ridley Scott was attached at one time). So part of the pleasure of the film is discovering how widely the story diverges from the Wall Street template. “The Wolf of Wall Street” suggests one who towers over the city like a behemoth, rather than a guy …

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

Search This Blog