![]() ![]() And Costner is no stranger to aging Agency studs: just last month he played one, and with his old easy power, in the Tom Clancy espionage thriller Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit. ![]() Both films also follow the Besson rule of giving the hero at least five adversaries at a time to beat up or gun down. In the first Taken, Neeson was a CIA field agent whose work had wrecked his status as husband and father, and who follows his daughter to Paris when she is abducted by sex-traffickers. © 2023 NYP Holdings, Inc.So far, so familiar. And you thought your dad was overprotective when you were a teen: At least he probably fired frowns instead of bullets over your head. 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.įar 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. Teaching his daughter to dance, Ethan puts on a slow-dance record. When the movie is really funny is when it’s trying to be emotional. 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. But Papa says hold on: He’s torturing an Italian accountant for information, and the hostage has some excellent ideas on marinara sauce. Later, the kid calls him up asking for a spaghetti-sauce recipe - because in this movie teens have never heard of Google. 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). 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. 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. Hey, wouldn’t you allow some random trollup to inject your arm with mystery drugs?ĭespite 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. To sweeten the offer to keep him working, she has a super-secret serum that’ll prolong his life. 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.Įxcept! 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. ![]() Kevin Costner plays one of the world’s minority of incredibly prolific yet destitute hit men. It’s like walking from the Pacific to the East Coast because you have this dream of seeing Trenton.īesson 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. 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. ![]() This time the American Dad in Paris is a deadly spy instead of a mobster. 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. At the Empire, the Lincoln Square, the Kips Bay, others Rated PG-13 (action violence, profanity, sensuality). ![]()
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