3 Days to Kill

3 Days to Kill is directed by tv veteran McG but the real auteur is the scriptwriter Luc Besson. Besson specializes in slick noisy thrillers often with stilletoed hit-gals and the Eiffel Tower glistening behind.

The film seems a mishmash, with the spy thriller, road-chase and shoot-em-up elements cut with the comedy of domestic subplots. Ultimately the comic spirit rules.

In the non-comic, retired superagent Ethan (ubiquitous Kevin Costner) is dying of cancer, but the CIA will give him an experimental drug if he does one last spree for them. His meter running out, Ethan wants to win back his teenage daughter (Hailee Steinfeld) and his beautiful wife Christine (Connie Nielsen). He has woefully neglected both for all his CIA years. How Ethan interweaves his agent and his father duties is good for laughs. But a massive suspension of disbelief is required when we watch the dying, weak, hallucinating hero summon the skills, stamina and ingenuity to do his dirty work.

Maybe we don’t have to believe it. The film reads as an attempt to bring family values into the global killer genre. But the heroism inevitably dissolves into comedy.

At the centre of the film Besson seems to be humanizing the CIA. However cold their operations, the undercover killers for democracy are really normal family men, nice guys. They try to maintain a front of normalcy while they scuttle the globe saving western civilization. Ethan uses his martial arts not just to stop the sale of a dirty bomb to the Syrians (which side we don ’t know, but who cares?) but to save his underage daughter from gang rape. We thank heavens our guys can do that. And if the agent has been living on lies, why, that's as normal as his teenage daughter's confession to lie all the time. 

The cherry on the Up the CIA Sundae is the black African family Ethan not only didn’t kill but let them live in his flat until their latest baby is born. That’s the CIA for you, a force for new life, defending the disadvantaged and helping restore world order, at least in two families’ home life. Like Ethan’s front, Besson seems here to be “in sales,” flacking for the CIA. Take that, Snowden! 
     On the other hand, the CIA is brought down a peg when Ethan’s first boss, a business-like woman, is replaced by the cartoon figure of a brassy broad. And again, when the villainous Albino’s driver and his accountant are redefined by their own domestic comedies, undercutting the evil that has drawn the CIA’s bloody effort. In the spirit of comedy the hero lets these two reformed villains live. This thriller is really a comedy at heart.