3 DAYS TO KILL Is a Decent Way To Kill Two Hours On a Sunday Afternoon

3 DAYS TO KILL Review:

- Even at their worst, Luc Besson-produced films tend to have a pulpy, B-movie sensibility that I find entertaining. Unfortunately, 3 DAYS TO KILL - directed by McG and co-written by Besson - is indeed one of the lesser films that the legendary director has had his name attached to. Don't get me wrong, it's got its moments, and there's some real fun to be had here. But the film seems to be an uneasy melding of Besson's pulp-action, darkly satirical sensibilities with McG's lighter, fluffier tendencies. The movie wants to be both badass and sappy - a weird mix of McG's TV show Chuck and Besson's signature spy thrillers like Leon: The Professional. The result is a film that is sort of all-over-the-place, and that begins to come apart at the seams the longer it goes.

What must be said, however, is that - hell yeah, it's good to see Kevin Costner back as a badass. It's been far too long, and guys like Costner only get more entertaining the older and more grizzled they become. And Costner excels here as a former trained CIA killer named Ethan Renner. This isn't him trying to play the superhero - no, this is a guy whose back and knees ache, who's got a lot of mileage, and who is most definitely too old for this $#!%. Costner really helps to carry the movie, and he ably juggles all of its tonal extremes. He's pretty much the only person in the film who pulls off both the badassery and the sentimentality with aplomb.

Now, Costner is good, but the plot he's thrown into does him no favors. Basically, just after retiring as a spy, Costner finds out that he has a deadly disease that leaves him with less than a year to live. Hoping to make the best of the time he has left, he travels to Paris to try to reconcile with his estranged wife (Connie Nielsen) and daughter (Hailee Steinfeld). But when he arrives, a mysterious, femme-fatale CIA handler named Vivi (Amber Heard) recruits him for one last mission. It seems that a terrorist whom Ethan had put away years back is now on the loose, and Ethan is once again needed to track him down. In exchange for his services, Vivi promises Ethan an experimental cure for his disease.

What ensues is a very Chuck-like comedy of errors, in which Ethan attempts to balance his new-found commitment to his family with his renewed obligation to the CIA. The problem is that the movie doesn't focus in enough on the main characters or plot to really make us care, all the while distracting with numerous subplots that are go-nowhere.

For example, Amber Heard's character, Vivi, feels like a lot of wasted potential. I'm an unabashed Amber Heard fan, and I think she excels at doing campy, pulpy, winking-at-the-audience parts (see: Drive Angry). However, the movie never really settles on what the deal is with Vivi - we get vague hints that she's an exhibitionist and a danger-addict. And there's a half-baked attempt at creating an adversarial relationship with Costner, who inexplicably seems not only strangely immune to her feminine wiles, but also actively turned off by them. Vivi is a fun character, and Heard vamps and camps it up with gusto - but the character is ultimately too random - and too tonally off from most of the rest of the film - to make an impact.

As another example, there's a pretty pointless subplot in which Costner goes back to the old apartment he kept in Paris, only to find it occupied by a large, semi-impoverished family. Initially, Costner aims to kick out the squatters, but soon warms up to them. It's a very needless plot thread that just makes the movie feel padded. Meanwhile, the film's villains are sorely lacking in personality and clear motivation, and are generic as can be. Same goes for Ethan's wife - Nielsen's character is just sort of there, and we don't quite see any evidence of why Ethan is so eager to win her back. Most of the time, she seems sort of abrasive and cold towards him, until suddenly a switch is flipped and she inexplicably comes around.

One more bit of oddness: the entire story thread involving the magic serum that Vivi gives to Ethan - it's incredibly random in how it plays out, and makes no real sense. The whole conceit is that the drug makes Ethan woozy and weak, unable to see straight or stand straight. So why is Vivi giving it to him just before missions? And why, exactly, is Ethan needed for these missions - at the least, couldn't they get him some back up? Point being: if the CIA is so intent on catching the badguys here, why send in a guy, solo, who's prone to blacking out on the job? I was waiting for some twist about Ethan being manipulated by the CIA, but it never came.

Handled much better, however, is the Costner-Steinfeld, father-daughter relationship. Steinfeld is a great young actress, and she, like Costner, makes scenes that could have been eye-rollingly sappy work way better than they have a right to.

What also works, for the most part, is the action. McG has always had a knack for staging fun, energetic action scenes - and he does it again here.There is some classic Besson-style mayhem - gunfights, car-chases, and good ol' fashioned brawls. Nothing quite as good as the best scenes in, say, Taken, but some very solid stuff nonetheless. And Costner dishes out the right hooks with gravitas aplenty. He also gets a chance to hit us with some dryly funny "get off my lawn" humor, which sometimes misses the mark, but occasionally made me chuckle. In particular, a speech he gives to his daughter's soccer-playing boyfriend about the merits of real American football is pretty amusing. What's more, even when the movie is sort of flailing plot and tone-wise, it still looks great and features all sorts of well-shot Paris locales.

I can sometimes chalk up the weirdness in these Besson-produced films to them simply having a slightly foreign-feeling, Eurocentric sensibility. And often, I'm willing to forgive or even embrace the jarring eccentricities because they are outweighed by a tangible, sleek sense of subversiveness - and a visceral badassery - that makes these movies feel distinct and unique from their American counterparts. However, the eccentricities of 3 DAYS TO KILL include major logic gaps, underdeveloped characters, and tonal oddities that can't simply be covered up by a game lead in Costner and some bursts of cool action. And yet, there is fun to be had here, and fans of Euro-action may still want to give this one a look. Just don't expect the next Taken.

My Grade: B-

ENDER'S GAME Is Entertaining But Bland Sci-Fi

ENDER'S GAME Review:

- Somehow, Ender's Game (the book) was something of a cultural blind spot for me. I'm not sure how or why, but I knew of it only by reputation before going into the movie adaptation. I'm always a little weary of movies like this suffering from compression problems that seem to so often go hand-in-hand with the adaptation process. And I think ENDER'S GAME does indeed suffer from the sort of jumpiness and rushed-feeling narrative that can plague this sort of endeavor. Overall, I found this to be a decently enjoyable film - and in some ways, it's an interesting departure from the kind of story that is typical of a big Hollywood franchise-starter type movie. But at the end of the day, the movie never 100% sold me on its basic premise, never fully made me buy into its world. And for sci-fi, that is an issue.

ENDER'S GAME tells the story of Ender Wiggin (Asa Butterfield), an outwardly meek but inwardly strong young boy who - in a world that is picking itself up and putting itself back together after a devastating alien invasion - is part of a corps of child-soldiers being trained to decimate earth's enemies. It's believed that only children possess the mental dexterity and intuition to properly wage the space battles of the future. However, not just anyone makes the final cut to actually become an active soldier. Children in the program are put through a rigorous series of tests and challenges (including being separated into teams that compete in various competitions), and only a select few make it past the various stages of training. From the start, the Big Brother-like leaders of the International Army have their eye on Ender. One, Colonel Graff (Harrison Ford) believes Ender to be a messianic figure who will lead the army's fight against the bug-like alien Formecs. And so, the seemingly unassuming Ender moves up from rank to rank - leading his own team, gaining respect, and displaying an increasing amount of cold calculation, tough-but-fair leadership, and knack for military-style strategy on the simulated battlefield. Intrigue also begins to build around the true nature of the war between humans and Formecs, and the real agenda of Graff and his cohorts.

Before I get to Asa Butterfield, I'll say that one of the clear and geek-out worthy highlights of ENDER'S GAME is the fact that it's got a very game, very engaged-seeming Harrison Ford in one of the lead roles. It's a lot of fun to see Ford in this sort of sci-fi story again, and this is easily one of his more memorable performances in years. We're not talking Oscar-caliber or anything - this is sort of Ford doing the classic Ford gruff-but-lovable thing, at times in semi-cartoonish fashion. But it's a fun performance, and a lot of the movie's best moments arrive when Ford brings the gravitas. One other guy who I'll sort of lump in with Ford in the awesome category is Nonso Anozie, who you will probably recognize from Game of Thrones. Anozie plays one of Graff's top lieutenants, sort of the drill sergeant for Ender and the other kids. And he pretty much rules it, stealing many scenes as a badass hiding a heart of gold.

As for Butterfield, he's pretty good as Ender, but not mind-blowingly good. Some of that can probably be blamed on the script - Butterfield, as Ender, is forced to make a lot of character leaps that feel like a stretch. The jumpiness of the script demands that Ender evolve from quiet loner to charismatic leader of men in what feels like a very abbreviated timeframe. What Butterfield does bring to Ender is a slightly American Psycho-esque feeling of possible evil intent lurking beneath. I don't know if that's in the book at all, but Butterfield does a nice job of making you wonder if Ender is one of those "could save us all, could destroy us all" types. I suspect Butterfield has got the chops to make a great Ender, but it may be that the script is asking too much of him and sort of undermining his performance with its leaps.

Moises Arias is an actor who got on my radar this past summer with his scene-stealing comedic turn in The Kings of Summer. Here, he's the Biff to Ender's Marty McFly, the somewhat cartoonishly vile rival kid-soldier named Bonzo. I have mixed feelings about Bonzo in the movie. I like Arias a lot, but his presence sort of reinforces the movie's slightly silly nature. Arias makes Bonzo a memorable villain, but the performance is perhaps a little broad, especially as compared to Butterfield's more serious version of Ender.

Other excellent actors seem to do the most with what they can, but they're stuck with underwritten parts. This is true of Hailee Steinfeld's Petra. I wanted some more exploration of her character, but she is mostly there to be a friend / crush for Ender. I'm pretty confident that Steinfeld is going to really wow us with her acting in the year's ahead, but this, alas, is not a showpiece role for her. A similar go-nowhere role belongs to Viola Davis, who seems to be slumming it as an army therapist, who is mostly around to challenge Ford's views on Ender and the other kids. One more sort-of-pointless part for a big-name actor goes to Ben Kingsley as Mazer Rackham, a legendary soldier with a mysterious past. Rackham seems randomly thrown into the movie to be yet another Obi-Wan like figure for Ender, but he sadly adds next to nothing to the film.

I've been talking about the jumpiness of the film, and I'll elaborate a bit. Everything just feels very rushed and hyper-compressed, but in a frustrating, head-scratching sort of way. I don't know if writer/director Gavin Hood was forced to make last-minute cuts or something, but too often it feels like we're watching the Cliff's Notes of the book, and not a story that works on its own. Ender seems to leap from rank to rank, from station to station, from unit to unit. It almost becomes comical as the movie goes on. He goes from army scrub to supreme leader in what feels like half an hour. What this means is that the film sets up certain key plot elements - like the team competition among the kids (a sort of capture-the-flag in zero-gravity game) - as major events, but then seems to rush through them, making us wonder what all the build-up was for in the first place. It's funny, you'd think the movie would do more to denote the passage of time, but things play out in a very linear manner. So again, it feels like the entire movie plays out over a few days' time, when the implication is that we're seeing something that should feel longer, more drawn-out, more epic.

On the premise itself: again, I'm just not sure that the movie does a great job of selling it. It feels like only brief lip-service is paid to why, exactly, the world has decided that only kids can fight this war. And it's never really shown or reinforced why the experienced adults shouldn't be involved. As the movie presents things, it starts to feel a little absurd. Ender knows next to nothing about real war, and yet the grizzled vet Graff just stands by and lets him fight, without even giving advice or input on tactics? Visually, the movie doesn't do a great job of selling this at all. Okay, sure, I could see why the older Ford might have a tough time competing in the zero-gravity games. But when subsequent battles simply involve kids sitting at manned battlestations and pulling triggers when called upon - why not have experienced sharpshooters in those positions? Finally, without spoiling anything, the end of the movie feels to me like a major cheat. Perhaps it's explained better in the book, but here, the tactic used in the end-game (hmmm ...) of the final battle ... it feels like the sort of thing that *someone* would have thought of before Ender spontaneously decides to go in that direction. And it feels like the kind of thing that wouldn't exactly require a messianic kid to think of / carry out. Am I missing something? Either way, the big finale, to me, feels decidedly undercooked.

Overall, I still enjoyed ENDER'S GAME in that it's a relatively breezy, sci-fi-lite film with some cool visuals and fun performances. Certain scenes, taken individually, are a lot of fun as eye-candy set-pieces (all the zero-g stuff looks great, and these scenes are shot with immersive fluidity by Gavin Hood). And there are some interesting socio-political elements to the plot that I found intriguing. Still, I was left with a feeling that this could have been something more - a truly thought-provoking and disturbing sci-fi story - if only the adaptation was done with a bit more elegance and with a better eye towards making this work as a standalone story (and less as a calculated, all-things-to-all-people franchise-starter). As it stands, Ender's Game is worth checking out, but not the must-see it might have been.

My Grade: B