3 Days to Kill

Writer Tom Clancy will be sorely missed, because he was so talented in writing great espionage novels in which a ton of films were based on. Well, I believe writer Luc Besson has taken his place, in a sense, because he writes about the same subject matter, but with some humor attached to it. As with the case of "3 Days to Kill", I believe it would have been yet another spy yarn that we've seen so many other times if it wasn't for the element of humor.

A dangerous international spy, Ethan Renner (Kevin Costner) is dying and is determined to give up his high stakes life to finally build a closer relationship with his estranged wife, Christine (Connie Nielson) and daughter, Zoey (Hailee Steinfeld), whom he's previously kept at arm's length to keep out of danger. But first, a colleague, Vivi Delay (Amber Heard) offers him an experimental drug that could save his life in exchange of completing one last mission-- even if it means juggling the two toughest assignments yet: hunting down the world's most ruthless terrorist, The Wolf (Richard Sammel) and looking after his teenage daughter for the first time in ten years, while his wife is out of town for three days.

Others to round out the cast are Tomas Lemarquis as The Albino, Marc Andreoni as Mitat Yilmaz, Bruno Ricci as Guido, Jonas Bloquet as Hugh, Eriq Ebouaney as Jules, Joakhim Sigue as Abbate, and Alison Valence as Sumia.

This was directed by McG ("Charlie's Angels" 2000, "We Are Marshall" '06, "Terminator Salvation" '09, "This Means War" '12, "Guilty" (TV movie) '13, "Westside" (TV movie) '13) and a ton of TV. The pacing in this was well executed in that Costner has intense scenes and serious and compassionate scenes where it takes a certain director to pull this off, McG does so in spades. Where this actually excelled was with the writing by Adi Hasak and Luc Besson based on Besson's story. As stated above, Besson is amazingly talented with the ability to combine intense action and humor at the right times with just the right amount of each. This makes his films keeping the audience on the edge of their seats, at the same time entertaining them with an element of humor to take just enough edge off of the story. This is not an easy combination. With the exception of a couple of very small slow areas, this was a very taught script.

I haven't seen Costner in such an enjoyable story in quite a while, and with a talented supporting cast and great writer in Besson and Hasak, this film will keep you on that exciting roller coaster ride from beginning to end.

Out of 4 Stars: 3.5                           Rated: PG-13                            117mins.