Happy New Year’s! The 2017 action film was directed by Brian Smrz and written by Zach Dean, Jim McClain, and Ron Mita. It’s the story of Travis ( Ethan Hawke ) a hitman seeking revenge, with only 24 hours left to live. Which I think is about the amount of time it took to write the script.
Minor Spoilers Ahead:
PLOT:
Travis on the surface, is just some regular guy. He’s just a hitman, that’s all. So after spending some quality time with his Father in law, Frank ( Rutgen Hauer), he goes to a bar and takes on a hit paying 1million$ a day.
Originally used in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDj3EU4oPbw
So he goes to Hong Kong and tracks this guy down, whose protected by Lin ( Xu Qing ). After gaining her trust at an airport, things go south. Resulting in Travis getting shot.
He wakes up, kills a doctor. The other one breaks it to him that’s he’ll be dead in less than 24 hours. So he goes on a mission to track down the people that hired him in the first place. Resulting in many collateral deaths along the way. But hey, it’s not like Ethan Hawke has anything to lose.
Between this and the end are a series of forgettable, overdone action scenes, most of which result nothing getting achieved.
Considering the premise, I don’t consider it a spoiler that he dies in the end. But how exactly he dies, I’ll leave that a mystery. The End.
CONCLUSSION:
Despite an alright premise, and a good cast, the film sacrificed story and character growth, for cheap, generic action gigs we’ve all seen before in 20 other movies, only most of them did it better. Personally, I’ve noticed that movies where the main character is given a short period to live, generally tend to be meh-to bad. 88 Minutes with Al Pacino being a good example of that.
Sure, the scenes with Rutgen Hauer were all about as good as can be. So, they did something right at least. And yes, Hawke gave out a performance reflecting what he had to work with. An amazing actor with a mediocre script and a mediocre character to work with. I mean, what was his motive? Revenge? Pretty generic if you ask me. Sure he wnated to save Rutgen Hauer. A brief phonecall scene lasting around 15 seconds. Otherwise, the character was void of any uniqueness whatsoever.
So yeah, I get why didn’t win that Oscar for this. Like they say, :”You can make a terrible movie out of a great screenplay, but you can’t make a good movie out of a bad screenplay.” Overall, for what it was, I’d give this film a 5/10.
-The Screenwriter
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