I enjoyed myself well enough with this film--it was a fun way to kill an hour and a half, but that's not to say that it brought anything new to the table or was especially well done.
The film's major problem is a lack of focus. It tries to juggle too many plot threads at once. The main character spends the film simultaneously working to rebuild a relationship with his wife and daughter, fighting off an illness that will kill him in a matter of months, getting used to a working relationship with his new handler/partner, and hunting down The Big Bad Guy. And, oh yeah, he also has squatters living in his apartment, including a woman about to give birth. A better film could weave these various threads into a frantic tapestry, but "3 Days to Kill" merely jumps between the various plotlines with no real sense of focus.
Some moments in the film worked better than others, and there were some comedic moments, but I frequently got the sense that the film thought these moments were more clever than they really are. The action scenes were standard, nothing spectacular. Sometimes a film's shortcomings can be overlooked if the action scenes are frequent and good enough that film can be excused as "just trying to be entertaining" ("Pompeii" is a good example). While I was somewhat entertained by "3 Days to Kill", it did not reach this threshold and is, in truth, not a particularly good film.
I liked certain elements of this film quite a bit, but they never completely congealed into a whole.
The first half of the film executed its premise very well, even if it was nothing original. It features a woman trapped in a loveless marriage (at least on her part) who falls in love with another man. They then plot to murder her husband so they can be together. I've seen the general concept done before--forbidden love leading to murderous acts, but it is done effectively here. The audience is genuinely made to pity the character of Terese, not just because of her unhappy marriage, but because of the series of circumstances, beginning when she was a girl, that led to her being trapped in it. Her attraction to a friend of her husband's and the beginning of their affair are believable. Some of these early love scenes are impressively erotic, especially considering the very small amounts of nudity in the film.
Once Terese and her lover have successfully gotten rid of her husband, things start to fall apart for them. Ironically, this is where things start to fall apart for the film as well. The growing distrust that builds between the characters feels obligatory, like watching a morality play who's purpose is to show that evil deeds are always punished. The rising tension felt like it was taking place for its own sake, rather than as the organic result of the characters and their actions. The ending it built to felt unbelievable to me on a variety of levels. One thing I did enjoy during the latter half of the film, however, was that the actual killing of Terese's husband is not shown where it chronologically occurs in the film. It is used as a flashback much later, when things between Terese and her new lover are at their worst. This was an effective way to illustrate the nature of the secret the two lovers had been keeping between themselves, and it would have been even more effective had the growing animosity between them felt genuine.
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