Three days, three women, one Kevin

Everybody’s favourite (or least favourite) Hollywood golden boy has been making a resurgence in movies lately. I’ll admit that I often love Kevin Costner movies while hardly appreciating the work of the man himself in them. Time has a way of changing things. 3 Days to Kill is an excellent movie and yes, Mr. C does a damn fine job of things.

Costner plays Ethan Renner, a retired CIA agent who finds out that he is terminally ill. While looking to reconcile with his estranged wife Christine (Connie Nielsen) and daughter Zoey (Hailee Steinfeld), he is approached by Vivi Delay (Amber Heard), a mysterious young woman who uses an experimental drug as a bargaining chip to coax him back into action.

But there’s a catch: Christine will only let him near Zoey on the promise that he isn’t “in the business” anymore. His job is what drove the family apart, after all.

This is what I would call a dilly of a pickle. His life is hanging by a thread. He needs to buy more time to smooth things out with his wife and daughter. The only way he can get help is by doing the one thing that his wife made him promise not to do. It’s a good thing that Ethan is cool as a cucumber.

There’s a lot to appreciate in the new film by McG, the director who made Charlie’s Angels such a fun flick. It probably helped a lot that famed French polymath Luc Besson was behind the story. One could do a comparison and see how 3 Days takes a lot of elements from his first major Hollywood film LĂ©on (better known as The Professional) but improves upon it somewhat for a more mature audience.

This is not just an action movie about a highly-trained special agent who has all the guns, gets into fast-flying fisticuffs and hard-driving street races Ă  la The Bourne Identity. 3 Days also isn’t just a tender drama about a man trying against all odds to reconnect with the people he loves the most. Also, it isn’t just a comedy about an aging spy who runs into all kinds of absurd situations while juggling work and his private life.

It’s all three of those and more. McG does an impressive job of juggling all those simultaneous and intermingling storylines while still offering a complicated formulaic movie that has a heart. It should do as much to appeal to younger as well as older cinemagoers. And truth be told, it can easily find fans of any gender.

In short, I liked 3 Days to Kill a lot. It’s still a Hollywood movie but one could – if one was so inclined – dig deeper to ponder its more profound meanings about the importance of family, and more specifically, the value of women. It’s practically a love letter to all women. This really shouldn’t come as any surprise since Besson has put women on a pedestal across his entire oeuvre with strong female characters in such telltale works as La Femme Nikita, LĂ©on, The Messenger and The Fifth Element.

I even enjoyed Kevin Costner’s work in it too, something I don’t say too often. I’m already looking forward to my second viewing.