3 Days To Kill (2014) * 1/2

Directed by:  McG

Starring:  Kevin Costner, Connie Nielsen, Hailee Steinfeld, Amber Heard

3 Days To Kill wants to be a CIA action thriller and a family drama in which a man reconnects with his estranged family.     It is an ungainly fit.     I wasn't sure after a while if I was watching an action movie or a sitcom.     It tries to be both but succeeds at neither.     We're left with an earnest Kevin Costner trying his best in a script that keeps him adrift.

As the film opens, the CIA hires a very sexy agent named Vivi (Heard) to oversee the capture of notorious arms dealers (as if there are any other kind).    The arms dealers are The Wolf (whom no one has ever seen) and his lieutenant The Albino.     Vivi is instructed to kill The Wolf while veteran agent Ethan Renner (Costner) is tasked with killing everyone else associated with an arms deal.     Things go bad and the Wolf and Albino escape.     Renner, who has a telltale cough in his very first appearance onscreen, collapses while chasing The Albino and is hospitalized.     He has lung cancer and given three months to live, plus he is unceremoniously dumped by the CIA.   

With no CIA career left, Ethan goes to Paris to seek out his estranged wife and daughter, who are leery to let him back into their lives.     He promises his wife (Nielsen) he is out of the CIA, but soon Vivi reappears in a flashy sports car offering a deal:   Track down The Albino and The Wolf for her so she can kill them and she will give him an experimental drug which may prolong his life.      Vivi is now disguised in a blonde wig and a leather outfit, while racing through Paris streets at like 150 miles per hour.     She is as inconspicuous as a black cockroach crawling across a white rug (to quote Costner in JFK, which was the type of movie he was making all those years ago).

Vivi's role in 3 Days To Kill is not clear.    Is she still with the CIA?    Is she rogue?   She has very little onscreen time, which makes we wonder if many of her scenes weren't casualties of the editing process.      She acts like a femme fatale, so we keep expecting something to be done with her, but nothing materializes.     How she manages to stay out of harm's way while doing everything possible to draw attention to herself is a mystery also.     And what is the deal with her and the strip club?     Maybe the director was desperate for some local color.

Another group of unnecessary characters is the African family of squatters Ethan finds in his apartment when he goes there.     He tries to have them evicted, but is assured by the police that "there are laws against getting rid of squatters in the middle of winter".     I'm no expert on French law, but that sounds like something the screenwriters dreamed up just to stick Ethan with these people.     Why are they even around?    They serve no useful function to the plot, although I was halfway expecting the patriarch to be revealed as a spy or something.

Ethan is hardly ever at his apartment anyway, since his wife conveniently goes out of town on business, and he has a chance to look after his daughter and reconnect with her.     They start off at odds, develop a truce, and then reconcile.     Also, Ethan trains her to ride a bike in roughly one hour if you're interested.    Meanwhile, Ethan has enough time to track down associates of The Wolf and The Albino, including their limo driver who Ethan inexplicably keeps alive to dispense needed parenting advice.     There are more than a fair share of moments where Ethan is about to get medieval on someone's ass only to be interrupted by a call from his daughter (with a special ringtone and all).     This isn't funny the first time or the 25th time. 

If all of this sounds more than a little ridiculous, well, it is.     3 Days To Kill is all over the map and most of it we can't take seriously anyhow.     It is a thriller with little thrills and we aren't much moved by the family stuff either, since we have seen it before in better movies.     Kevin Costner used to star in films like Field Of Dreams, Dances With Wolves, and JFK.     There was a time he couldn't make a wrong move.     Then, his career slump hit in which he starred in a series of clunkers with a few exceptions.      His recent Emmy win for Hatfields and McCoys has bolstered his career again, but if he chooses projects like 3 Days To Kill to star in, then his career will go right back into the toilet.     At least we know that Liam Neeson hasn't completely cornered the market on movies about men pushing 60 kicking people's asses, if such a thing is refreshing to you.