MOVIE REVIEWS: 3 DAYS TO KILL

The reviews are mostly kinda middlin’ for 3 Days to Kill, starring Kevin Costner. None of the critics seem to like it very much or dislike it very much. For example, Betsy Sharkey write in the Los Angeles Times that the movie’s “a little like baby bear’s porridge, neither all bad nor all good, though not quite right yet either.” A.O. Scott in the New York Times also expresses his ambivalence about the film. “By any reasonable standard, 3 Days to Kill is a terrible movie: incoherent, crudely brutal, dumbly retrograde in its geo- and gender politics. But it is also, as much because of as in spite of these failings, kind of fun,” he writes. “This is a movie star, and even in a movie as ridiculous as this one that still counts for something,” he concludes. Likewise, Scott Bowles in USA Today comments that “while Costner gets nothing but your standard rogue-agent dialogue, he’s aging gracefully and makes a believable beleaguered agent. But he has so little to work with that the movie grinds to a halt every time he’s not turning a goon into Swiss cheese.” But Joe Neumaier in the New York Daily News has some advice on what actors attempting to make a comeback should avoid: “Half-baked action flicks like 3 Days to Kill.” Nevertheless, he acknowledges, “This dreadful movie … only comes alive when the star briefly shows the casual looseness that once was his calling card.” Ty Burr in the Boston Globe remarks that the movie did have a chance to become something really bad. “Every so often a bad movie will become so mind-bogglingly, existentially bad that it turns perversely good,” he notes, but then quickly adds, “Unfortunately, 3 Days to Kill isn’t that bad.”