If you go to this movie, which I wouldn't recommend, try not to vomit over your shoes.3 Days to Kill is an action comedy directed by McG ( Terminator Salvation) and stars Kevin Costner as an international spy called Ethan Renner who wishes to make peace with his estranged ex-wife (Connie Nielsen) and their daughter Hailee Steinfeld when he learns that he is terminally ill. And an even worse one where Zooey, having realised that he's not the callous absentee parent she thought he was, dances with dad to the strains of Bread's schlockular "Make It With You". There's a frightful scene where Kevin is about to terrorise The Wolf's Italian accountant, but instead gets him to tell his daughter over the phone how to make the perfect tomato sauce. Although dirt-poor they are kindly, beatific and wise, and treat Kevin as a God-like being. He gets to be nice to an extended family of African immigrants who are squatting in his Paris apartment. Every time he's about to shoot or punch someone, his phone rings and he has to talk to his daughter (Costner and Steinfeld, above). Kev is soon trapped on a preposterous treadmill of shoot-outs and whizzy car chases, interrupted by episodes of bathos and low farce as he tries to reconcile violent death with heartwarming family values. There have been some cracking Hollywood thrillers set in Paris - Ronin, Charade - but this isn't one of them. As an added incentive, Vivi just happens to have an untried serum that cures rare brain cancers. Up pops Vivi, a kind of Bond Girl with enhanced executive privileges, who insists that Ethan is the only guy who can help her track down the man they call The Wolf, and his sidekick, the man they call The Albino (they've been selling dirty bombs to the Syrians or something). Huh? Anyway, he's too sick to be an "operative" any more, so that's why he decides to go to Paris to catch up on the ex-missus ( Connie Nielsen) and daughter Zooey (Hailee Steinfeld, who was great in True Grit but is insufferably whiny and stupid here). However, it turns out that Kev's wheezy cough is not in fact a thespian tic like a Larry Olivier stage limp, but a symptom of a rare brain cancer which has affected his lungs. The extra-extended opening sequence is a riot of explosions, gunfire and tumbling bodies, and sets up the bearded, battered Costner as a grizzled old dog who can massacre a room-full of baddies as nonchalantly as buying a newspaper. The nearest thing to a coherent thread is Costner's lead performance. In between, it's as if 3 Days to Kill is the product of an accident with an exploding genre-blender, which has splattered the walls with a sticky mess of feeble comedy, slapstick, hi-tech action and tepid romance. You'd never guess this was a story dreamed up and co-written by Luc Besson, unless you'd seen his Taken, Nikita and Leon movies, echoes of which pop up all over the place. However, before he can achieve this, his new CIA handler, the vampish and enigmatic Vivi (Amber Heard, taking aim below right), twists his arm and gets him to undertake one final mission. In a nutshell: veteran CIA hitman Ethan Renner ( Kevin Costner) vows to give up his old job of committing international mass murder and try to re-establish relationships with his estranged wife and teenage daughter.
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