3 Days to Kill Review Roundup: Critics Not So Hot for the Kevin Costner and Amber Heard Thriller

New action flick called an "ambitious disaster"

By Brett Malec Feb 22, 2014 1:02 AMTags
3 Days to Kill, Three Days To Kill, Amber HeardJulian Torres/Relativity Media

Kevin Costner is back on the big screen and playing one bad-ass butt-kicker!

In 3 Days to Kill, Costner plays a former CIA agent who discovers he has a fatal illness. The only promise at survival is an experimental drug and the only way he can get that drug is by completing one last assignment: assassinating two European arms dealers.

While following orders from femme fatale Vivi (Amber Heard), Costner's character gets to work while trying to mend his relationships with daughter and estranged wife before he dies.

So how do critics feel about the new action flick? Read on to find out.

• Joe Neumaier from the New York Daily News cuts right to the chase. He writes, "Let's say you're Kevin Costner, icon of the 1980s, Academy Award-winning director, a guy people were glad to see again in Man of Steel, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit and on the TV miniseries Hatfields & McCoys. What should you avoid as you continue your comeback? Half-baked action flicks like 3 Days to Kill." Ouch!

• The Huffington Post's Zaki Hasan addresses the film's comparisons to Taken (they were both written by Luc Besson) while also addressing Costner's career comeback, writing, "For his latest starring turn, the McG-directed 3 Days to Kill, Costner reinvents himself yet again, amping up the ass-kickery as a world weary, no-nonsense CIA assassin and clearly tearing a page out of the "Liam Neeson Playbook For Late-Career Reinvention" (produced by Luc Besson, no less). However, while the original Taken gave Neeson a compelling character to play and dropped him into the middle of a taut, to-the-point storyline, 3 Days to Kill does its star no favors with a muddled, often-meandering narrative (story by Besson) that goes in too many directions, and far too often thinks it's more clever than it is."

• In a review whose title slams the flick as an "ambitious disaster," The Wrap's Todd Gilchrist concludes his piece with, "Ultimately, 3 Days to Kill is almost crazy enough to be appealing as camp, and certainly has enough leftfield one-liners to keep midnight moviegoers shouting dialogue for years; but as anything remotely serious or engaging, the only thing the movie actually kills is the time and money you spent watching it."

Julian Torres/Relativity Media

• Variety's Geoff Berkshire says of 3 Days to Kill, "any possibility of sleeper-hit status has been fatally compromised by watered-down fight scenes and misguided family man dramatics." Berkshire does find a little hope in the film's visuals, adding, "Although the film's tech package is reliably proficient, one would have hoped for more onscreen fireworks from the union of ultra-American McG and Costner with French mainstay Besson. Alas, this European vacation is a time-killer of the most mundane variety."

• Betsey Sharkey of the L.A. Times had one of the more favorable reviews, writing that the movie is "neither all bad nor all good, though not quite right yet either. Still, 3 Days to Kill is not a terrible way to kill a couple of hours." However, she does point out the flick's competing plotlines, writing, "How to balance a father-daughter reconciliation story with a spy thriller, with a life-and-death medical crisis, with a farce? This is where the film's many fraying edges are exposed."

• Rotten Tomatoes gives 3 Days to Kill a 27 percent rating, adding, "3 Days to Kill uneasily mixes technically accomplished action sequences with an underdeveloped family conflict."