3 Days to Kill Movie Review

3 Days to Kill Movie  (2014)

Pauline Kael once said "Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them."

She has a point. Unfortunately, 3 Days to Kill isn't great trash. It's just plain old trashy trash. What a shame. 3 Days to Kill is about an aging CIA hit-man named Ethan Renner (Kevin Costner) who gets cancer and is given three to five months to live. Luckily for him, if he's able to complete some assignments for the CIA, he'll be given some experimental cancer drug that may help him stay alive to see his estranged daughter (Hailee Steinfeld) and his wife (Connie Neilson). Before I get into the meat and potatoes of my review, let me get something straight. I am not a pompous, uppity, and overtly critical movie watcher. I always try to look for the good in films. I can enjoy a crappy movie. I'm even sort of a fan of dumb action flicks. Sure, they don't have much cinematic sustenance, but they can be a load of fun. I can enjoy stuff like Escape Plan and White House Down.
Which is why I was somewhat looking forward to 3 Days to Kill. It was starring Kevin Costner. Costner's last action outing, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, was more than halfway decent. I was sure this would be the same brand of espionage-y fun. I was wrong. 3 Days to Kill was as much fun as death and taxes. It got off to a decent start with a classic spy vs. spy set up. Then it quickly became half cliche and very predictable spy movie and half boring melodrama. I tried really hard to like this movie, but it couldn't be done. Kevin Costner has the capacity to be the kind of action star Liam Neeson has become. Unfortunately, he seems content to "act" in garbage like this. I'm putting act in parentheses because all Costner did was walk around the movie with one expression on his face. It seemed as if Costner was just acting in this so he could get a paycheck and get out of there.
I don't blame him. The movie has a lot more problems than just Costner's performance. This movie is directed by some guy named McG. The only other McG directed movie I've seen was Terminator Salvation. I should have known right then and there that this was going to be bad. I don't know who taught this guy how to direct action sequences, but they did an awful job. Whenever some "exciting" action is happening, it feels as if they handed the camera to someone having a seizure and told them to film the scene. The supposed awesome action sequences were irritating to look at and amatuerly filmed. I guess we should count ourselves lucky there isn't much action in this action movie. Most of the film revolves around Costner's character bonding with his daughter and dealing with family melodrama. The script is weak so the family melodrama isn't even interesting in the slightest. Teenager problems and daddy issues rarely make good movies. Especially if a certain movie is marketed as a cool action flick and is actually a mind numbing and syrupy family movie. I didn't go see 3 Days to Kill to watch Kevin Costner teach his teenage daughter how to ride a bike! I don't care who she goes to the prom with! I came for an action movie not a mediocre family togetherness piece of crap! The thing is, it really has nothing going for it. It's very poorly written. The plot is fairly cliche. (So-and-so foreign villain has a bomb and he's bad and you need to take him down like in every other action movie. Except a lot more boring!)he acting is sub par. The action sequences are frenetic and annoying. There are also several half-hearted attempts at jokes here. The jokes aren't funny. At all. The whole movie seems like someone had half a good idea and then gave up there but you can judge for yourself later. take a look at this movie and comment.

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Jack Ryan : Shadow Recruit Movie Review

 Jack Ryan : Shadow Recruit (2014)

Sorry Chris Pine, no matter what, you'll never live up to Harrison Ford. That guy's shoes are just too big to fill.

Imagine if you took a Mission: Impossible movie, took out all the main characters except for Ethan Hunt, and then toned down everything a few notches. You would then basically have Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but I feel it's fairly accurate. The new Jack Ryan flick is about, well, Jack Ryan (Chris Pine). It starts with him in Oxford where he's studying economics, finding out about the 9/11 attacks. Then flashes forward a few years where Ryan is a Marine. He gets a bad injury in a helicopter crash and is put out of commission for a while. At rehab, he's approached by CIA director/agent guy, Thomas Harper (Kevin Costner). Harper is impressed by Ryan, and then invites him to join the CIA as in analyst. After some thought, Ryan decides to go for the job. He goes undercover at a Wall Street firm, looking for false accounts and stuff of that nature. He has a girlfriend named Cathy (Keira Knightley) and he makes a decent amount of money. Jack seems to be having a decent life. Then he has to go to Russia to check out some unknown and possibly dangerous accounts held under business baddie Viktor Cherevin (Kenneth Branagh). This is when Ryan is thrown head over heels into the spy world. Having to kill people, steal information, and lie. The stuff James Bond does with no problem. I don't think anyone had really high hopes for Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit. It's a reboot, released in January, based on a series of movies that weren't really barn burners themselves. Sure, Harrison Ford had a decent run, and The Hunt for Red October was pretty good, but the last version with Ben Affleck was just okay and the films never had a big following in the first place. The fact that the newest Jack Ryan film has even more than an ounce of originality is really a miracle. I didn't love Jack Ryan. It was really just okay, nothing truly special. Yet, as a fun little winter movie, Jack Ryan does everything it has to, and then some. Last year around this time, the newest Die Hard came out. The only thing that had to offer was being really disappointed in Bruce Willis. Too many action films that get released (I'm looking at you Fast & Furious 6) are just mediocre explosion shoot out fests with a generic plot. Jack Ryan, while occasionally cliche, has a very interesting and original story with an okay performance by Chris Pine. The evil scheme planned by Cherevin, involves buying up lots of American dollars and then dumping them as the dollar goes down and then doing some other confusing things that would basically leave America very, very poor. It would cause a second Great Depression. I have to give credit to director Branagh and writers David Koepp (who actually wrote the first Mission: Impossible) and Adam Cozad. I haven't seen this story before, and it's done quite well. While the film isn't groundbreaking in any way, it's nice to see a stripped down and slick action movie that isn't trying to be too grand or too convoluted. I enjoyed the film quite a bit. It's nowhere near great, but's it's exciting and fun. One major problem I had was the accents. Kenneth Branagh, who did a good job directing, put on a very cliche and awful Russian accent to play the villain. It sounded like an American trying to do a Russian accent, which is what it was. Which isn't a good thing. The British Keira Knightley does an equally bad American accent. She sounded like Sandra Bernhard mixed with a 6th grade girl. There's also a scene with Knightley and Pine in a hotel that felt very clunky, overly sappy, and just out of place. The rest of the movie had a fairly nice flow. Pine is capable as the hero. He throws out that assured cockiness he played in the Star Trek films, and takes up this cool patriotic persona. He does what needs to be done. He isn't amazing, but he's good. This Jack Ryan movie isn't fantastic. It doesn't do anything revolutionary. It even occasionally seems repetitive And it's not the best action movie I've seen in a while. Yet, it's interesting and fun.
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