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

No matter how innocent you are, or how hard you try, they’ll find you guilty.

The Wrong Man (1956) (SPOILERS) I hate to say it, but old Truffaut called it right on this one. More often than not showing obeisance to the might of Hitchcock during his career-spanning interview, the French critic turned director was surprisingly blunt when it came to The Wrong Man . He told Hitch “ your style, which has found its perfection in the fiction area, happens to be in total conflict with the aesthetics of the documentary and that contradiction is apparent throughout the picture ”. There’s also another, connected issue with this, one Hitch acknowledged: too much fidelity to the true story upon which the film is based.

How would Horatio Alger have handled this situation?

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) (SPOILERS) Gilliam’s last great movie – The Zero Theorem (2013) is definitely underrated, but I don’t think it’s that underrated – Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas could easily have been too much. At times it is, but in such instances, intentionally so. The combination of a visual stylist and Hunter S Thompson’s embellished, propulsive turn of phrase turns out, for the most part, to be a cosmically aligned affair, embracing the anarchic abandon of Raoul Duke and Doctor Gonzo’s Las Vegas debauch while contriving to pull back at crucial junctures in order to engender a perspective on all this hedonism. Would Alex Cox, who exited stage left, making way for the Python, have produced something interesting? I suspect, ironically, he would have diluted Thompson in favour of whatever commentary preoccupied him at the time (indeed, Johnny Depp said as much: “ Cox had this great material to work with and he took it and he added his own stuff to it ”). Plus

He’s so persistent! He always gets his man.

Speed (1994) (SPOILERS) It must have been a couple of decades since I last viewed Speed all the way through, so it’s pleasing to confirm that it holds up. Sure, Jan de Bont’s debut as a director can’t compete with the work of John McTiernan, for whom he acted as cinematographer and who recommended de Bont when he passed on the picture, but he nevertheless does a more than competent work. Which makes his later turkeys all the more tragic. And Keanu and Sandra Bullock display the kind of effortless chemistry you can’t put a price tag on. And then there’s Dennis Hopper, having a great old sober-but-still-looning time.

But everything is wonderful. We are in Paris.

Cold War (2018) (SPOILERS) Pawel Pawlikowski’s elliptical tale – you can’t discuss Cold War without saying “elliptical” at least once – of frustrated love charts a course that almost seems to be a caricature of a certain brand of self-congratulatorily tragic European cinema. It was, it seems “ loosely inspired ” by his parents (I suspect I see where the looseness comes in), but there’s a sense of calculation to the progression of this love story against an inescapable political backdrop that rather diminishes it.

To survive a war, you gotta become war.

Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) (SPOILERS?) I’d like to say it’s mystifying that a film so bereft of merit as Rambo: First Blood Part II could have finished up the second biggest hit of 1985. It wouldn’t be as bad if it was, at minimum, a solid action movie, rather than an interminable bore. But the movie struck a chord somewhere, somehow. As much as the most successful picture of that year, Back to the Future , could be seen to suggest moviegoers do actually have really good taste, Rambo rather sends a message about how extensively regressive themes were embedding themselves in Reaganite, conservative ‘80s cinema (to be fair, this is something one can also read into Back to the Future ), be those ones of ill-conceived nostalgia or simple-minded jingoism, notional superiority and might. The difference between Stallone and Arnie movies starts right here; self-awareness. Audiences may have watched R ambo in the same way they would a Schwarzenegger picture, but I’m

One final thing I have to do, and then I’ll be free of the past.

Vertigo (1958) (SPOILERS) I’ll readily admit my Hitchcock tastes broadly tend to reflect the “consensus”, but Vertigo is one where I break ranks. To a degree. Not that I think it’s in any way a bad film, but I respect it rather than truly rate it. Certainly, I can’t get on board with Sight & Sound enthroning it as the best film ever made (in its 2012’s critics poll). That said, from a technical point of view, it is probably Hitch’s peak moment. And in that regard, certainly counts as one of his few colour pictures that can be placed alongside his black and white ones. It’s also clearly a personal undertaking, a medley of his voyeuristic obsessions (based on D’entre les morts by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac).

What do they do, sing madrigals?

The Singing Detective (2003) Icon’s remake of the 1986 BBC serial, from a screenplay by Dennis Potter himself. The Singing Detective fares less well than Icon’s later adaptation of Edge of Darkness , even though it’s probably more faithful to Potter’s original. Perhaps the fault lies in the compression of six episodes into a feature running a quarter of that time, but the noir fantasy and childhood flashbacks fail to engage, and if the hospital reality scans better, it too suffers eventually.

The game is rigged, and it does not reward people who play by the rules.

Hustlers (2019) (SPOILERS) Sold as a female Goodfellas – to the extent that the producers had Scorsese in mind – this strippers-and-crime tale is actually a big, glossy puff piece, closer to Todd Phillips as fashioned by Lorene Scarfia. There are some attractive performances in Hustlers, notably from Constance Wu, but for all its “progressive” women work male objectification to their advantage posturing, it’s incredibly traditional and conservative deep down.

You were a few blocks away? What’d you see it with, a telescope?

The Eyes of Laura Mars (1978) (SPOILERS) John Carpenter’s first serial-killer screenplay to get made, The Eyes of Laura Mars came out nearly three months before Halloween. You know, the movie that made the director’s name. And then some. He wasn’t best pleased with the results of The Eyes of Laura Mars, which ended up co-credited to David Zelag Goodman ( Straw Dogs , Logan’s Run ) as part of an attempt by producer Jon Peters to manufacture a star vehicle for then-belle Barbra Streisand: “ The original script was very good, I thought. But it got shat upon ”. Which isn’t sour grapes on Carpenter’s part. The finished movie bears ready evidence of such tampering, not least in the reveal of the killer (different in Carpenter’s conception). Its best features are the so-uncleanly-you-can-taste-it 70s New York milieu and the guest cast, but even as an early example of the sub-genre, it’s burdened by all the failings inherit with this kind of fare.

He is a brigand and a lout. Pay him no serious mention.

The Wind and the Lion (1975) (SPOILERS) John Milius called his second feature a boy’s-own adventure, on the basis of the not-so-terrified responses of one of those kidnapped by Sean Connery’s Arab Raisuli. Really, he could have been referring to himself, in all his cigar-chomping, gun-toting reactionary glory, dreaming of the days of real heroes. The Wind and the Lion rather had its thunder stolen by Jaws on release, and it’s easy to see why. As polished as the picture is, and simultaneously broad-stroke and self-aware in its politics, it’s very definitely a throwback to the pictures of yesteryear. Only without the finger-on-the-pulse contemporaneity of execution that would make Spielberg and Lucas’ genre dives so memorable in a few short years’ time.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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