"TAKEN" returns as a schizo comedy in "3 Days to Kill," featuring Kevin Costner as a CIA wetworker chasing terrorists while supervising his teenage daughter.
Costner plays Ethan, an agent with unique skills, skills acquired over a very long career, skills that would make him a nightmare for terrorists, etc.
That, of course, is the Liam Neeson speech from "Taken," written by Luc Besson, who takes that movie's father-daughter dynamic and makes it playful in his script for "3 Days."
As we see, no bone-crushing skill set, no matter how fearsome, is of use with the domestic side of fathering, fraught with terror in its own way. Ethan is at sea when responding to a hair crisis, a boy crisis or the stormy moods of his daughter (Hailee Steinfeld).
In other respects, "3 Days" is nothing like Besson, because the job of directing it has fallen to McG, he of the "Charlie's Angels" movies, who has Besson's taste for playfulness but not his gift for tone and control, and visceral action.
So the movie's a bit of a mess.
Costner has some nice scenes with Steinfield - he's an absent father trying to re-enter her life at a delicate phase - and there are flashes of the actor whose relaxed, masculine presence and easy rapport with women (Connie Nielsen is his estranged wife) contributed to such hits as "The Bodyguard."
And there are moments when the premise yields laughs. There's a running joke about Ethan torturing an informant (Marc Andreoni) for information about terrorists - and parenting (another riff, bordering on parody, on "Taken").
But where Besson uses action as an expression of character, McG too often sees it as a random jolt of energy. Ethan's pointlessly vixenish CIA handler, Amber Heard, keeps taking him on joyrides in her Audi, and it's more product placement than drama.
In these uncomfortable spaces, you have time to wonder whether McG is really the guy to be handling jokes about the CIA and torture.
And you wonder whether he's the guy to integrate more serious aspects of the story that inject a more substantial idea of mortality into the PG-13 high jinx.
I can think of no better fellow to handle these problems than Besson himself, who should think about delegating less and directing more.
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