“3 Days to Kill” Extraneous Subplots

“Extraneous Subplots”

“Hotshots” looks at a movie!

3 DAYS TO KILL stars Kevin Costner as Ethan, a CIA agent on a mission in Paris, where he happens to live when he isn’t working.

The mission is to capture a terrorist known as The Wolf, who is in possession of a dirty bomb and whom the CIA has been after for 10 years.

Ethan has a nagging cough from what he says is a cold that is killing him, and he was thinking of calling in sick even though he hasn’t had a sick day in 32 years of working for the CIA.

Ethan has an estranged wife, Christine, and a teenage daughter, Zoey, who live in Paris, but whom he hasn’t seen in five years, and when Ethan tries to call Zoey and wish her a happy birthday, the mission to capture The Wolf is compromised, and all hell breaks loose.

Ethan ends up chasing The Wolf’s henchman, known as the Albino, on foot, but Ethan collapses onto the ground just as he is about to catch him, and Ethan says, “I’m not running after you anymore.”

The Albino thus escapes, but this scene is designed to set up a similar scene which is the climax of the movie.

Ethan then finds out that his cough is more serious than a cold, and he is told that he has no more than three or five months to live and also told that the CIA thanks him for his service.

As if that isn’t bad enough, when Ethan goes to his apartment in Paris, he finds a family living there as squatters, and the law won’t let him kick them out.

Ethan wants to see Zoey before he dies, arranges to meet Christine and Zoey, and when Christine has to go to London for three days, Ethan agrees to watch Zoey while Christine is gone, thus setting up the double meaning of the title, because The Wolf comes back into the story.

Because Ethan might have spotted The Wolf in the compromised mission, he is recruited to find and kill The Wolf in return for an experimental drug that might save his life.

Zoey doesn’t even know what Ethan does for a living, and she has problems of her own that take up Ethan’s time and attention.

3 DAYS TO KILL has too many extraneous subplots.

I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”