Her ring-tone on his phone is "I Love It (I Don't Care)," which always goes off just as he's about the rip a guy's armpit hair off with duct tape. "Dad" keeps trying to get his rebellious teen to ride this cool purple bike he brought her. McG ("Charlie's Angels," "We are Marshall") stamps his signature on Besson's Euro-action vision with running gags. "You might want to take something for that cough. The girl doesn't know what Dad does for a living, or that he's dying. And that could mean more time with his estranged wife (Connie Nielsen) and the daughter he barely knows, played by "True Grit" teen Hailee Steinfeld. The carrot? She has an experimental drug that might give Ethan longer to live. But his new control agent, a vamp named ViVi and played to the stiletto-heeled hilt by Amber Heard, wants him to finish one last massacre - taking out a nuclear arms dealer and his associates in the City of Light. Again, this is a very disjointed movie given to some weird "what movie are we in now?" tangents.Besson, who morphed into a producer after "The Professional" and before "The Transporter," gives Costner the full Liam Neeson in "Taken" treatment, cashing in on a career of cool in a movie that moves almost fast enough to keep us from noticing how scruffy, discomfiting and absurdly over-the-top the whole thing is.Ĭostner is Ethan, a veteran C.I.A. There's some ethnic humor comic relief characters, plus a rather bizarre subplot involving a family of African immigrants squatting in Ethan's Paris apartment. The action storyline is woefully generic, grinding to a halt in the scenes that involve bad TV episode-worthy chatter about dirty bombs and feature cartoony, one-dimensional Eurotrash baddies dubbed The Wolf and The Albino. Nielsen has the least rewarding role of the family members the story never quite gets a bead on whether her character wants to be back with Ethan or not. He gets solid assistance from Steinfeld, who manages to not make her teen character as grating or cliche as the script could have taken her. You can see he's invested in this, formulaic plot and cheesy moments and all, and sells every moment of it with sincerity. The movie rests on the shoulders of Costner who carries it with gruff, old school, and all-American charm. Instead, we get a very confusing pseudo-femme fatale who ultimately doesn't pose much of a threat to either the hero or the villains. Is she someone who only comes alive when she's in the field? Is she someone whose only idea of field work comes from the movies she's seen? Is she living out some sort of fantasy then? We've no idea, but that idea would've been worth exploring (even if it belongs in a different film). There's nothing colorful about her, but when she's out in the field she's suddenly wearing dramatic wigs and outfits and driving fast. There's an interesting idea to her character established at the very start where we see her as a pretty ordinary CIA headquarters worker. Amber Heard walked in from some other film entirely, giving a very broad, vampy performance as Vivi, who dresses like she might be doing Mia Wallace or La Femme Nikita cosplay at a few points. It's trying to be a melodramatic and occasionally cheesy father-daughter (and estranged husband-wife) tale, a Taken/Bourne-style gritty action thriller, and a quirky '90s-style action comedy but only with intermittently effective results. Chases, shootouts, and brawls ensue even as Ethan tries to get to know the daughter his work's kept him away from all these years, a young woman who also doesn't know what her father really does for a living, Director McG (Charlie's Angels, Terminator Salvation) stages some decent action set-pieces and goes for a moody '70s vibe in some areas, but the movie's tone and story are jarringly disjointed. Ethan thinks he's now deactivated due to his health issues, but his contact in the field - the very out-there femme fatale Vivi (Amber Heard) - makes him the proverbial offer he can't refuse. Ethan's estranged wife Tina (Connie Nielsen) and teenage daughter Zooey (Hailee Steinfeld) live in Paris and, wouldn't you know it, his mission also just so happens to take place there, too.
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