When, last we caught up with Luc Besson, in “The Family,” he had a jokey comedy about lethal American gangsters in France worrying about their daughter’s high-school angst. “3 Days to Kill”? Totally different. This time the American Dad in Paris is a deadly spy instead of a mobster.
I picture Besson fondling dusty VHS copies of “The Sopranos” and “True Lies” gloating, “No one will ever discover my secret sources of inspiration!” It’s almost charming the way he goes to such effort to set up such terrible jokes. It’s like walking from the Pacific to the East Coast because you have this dream of seeing Trenton.
Besson provided the story and co-wrote the screenplay for a film directed by McG, who does his usual McGhastly job with action and is McGruesome when it comes to comedy. Kevin Costner plays one of the world’s minority of incredibly prolific yet destitute hit men. After a botched mission brought on by a mild case of brain and lung cancer, he quits and returns home to Paris figuring he’ll patch things up with his ex (Connie Nielsen) and his teen daughter (Hailee Steinfeld from “True Grit”) before he dies in a few months.
Except! There’s this other superspy (Amber Heard), a rising starlet of the CIA, who has been sent to Europe to “work with him,” which seems to mean racing around in hot rods in the kind of outfits Katy Perry would reject as too tarty, while telling him which baddies to kill. To sweeten the offer to keep him working, she has a super-secret serum that’ll prolong his life. Hey, wouldn’t you allow some random trollup to inject your arm with mystery drugs?
Despite being the go-to contractor hired by the CIA on save-the-planet jobs, Ethan (Costner) lives in a dump that has been taken over by a family of African squatters. So he crashes with his ex Tina (Nielsen), who, not having seen him in years, and just after learning he’s going to die soon, naturally goes off to London and leaves him with their daughter.
Hence the movie’s double-entendre title: Ethan’s daughter thinks she just has to endure some unexpected time with papa, whose spying career she doesn’t know about, but he’s got some assassinating to do. Still, he wants to be a good dad. So when he’s 10 feet from the door of the guy he needs to kill, he instead turns around and goes on an amusement-park ride with Zooey (Steinfeld).
Later, the kid calls him up asking for a spaghetti-sauce recipe — because in this movie teens have never heard of Google. But Papa says hold on: He’s torturing an Italian accountant for information, and the hostage has some excellent ideas on marinara sauce. A car dealer who knows the accountant gets so used to being kidnapped by Ethan that at one point he simply climbs into the trunk of his own car, in broad daylight on a busy street, requesting that Ethan get him back by 4:30 so he can pick up his kids from school.
When the movie is really funny is when it’s trying to be emotional. Teaching his daughter to dance, Ethan puts on a slow-dance record. Better: It’s “Make It With You.” Best: He tells his ex-wife, “I love her the same way I love you.” I hope not, buddy, but then again, this is France, and maybe that sort of thing is legal.
Far be it from me to give anything away, but if you’re hoping that this is the kind of movie that winds up with a gunfight at the prom, you may be in luck. And you thought your dad was overprotective when you were a teen: At least he probably fired frowns instead of bullets over your head.