Three Days to Kill (2014)

Kevin Costner goes a long way in selling “Three Days to Kill,” a Luc Besson-produced action/“comedy” about a dying CIA assassin named Ethan who goes home to Paris to see his estranged family – Connie Nielsen as wife, and Hailee Steinfeld as teen daughter – before he kicks. As it happens, the CIA has one last job for Ethan: Kill two bad guys known as The Albino and The Wolf, who are neither an albino nor a wolf. Golden carrot: Way-too young CIA handler Vivi (Amber Heard) has a magic cure that can keep our man alive. Costner acts aces, truly. But “Kill” made my skin crawl. I’ll say it: Besson shines a creep perv voyeur for teen girls here and with “Taken” and his so-long-ago “Leon.” He fixates on girls who cannot walk outside without falling victim to rape, not without “daddy” to save them. Steinfeld’s teen gets the treatment here. Besson’s fantasy? The take on grad-school-age Vivi as some 1980s Euro-fantasy dominatrix smells of a gross dream of middle-aged men with script approval. Nielsen’s wife has nothing to do but forgive her man, repeatedly. Blame director McG? No. This hangs on Besson. Dickless. D+

Paranoia (2013)

By the time most tech jumps from lab to retail, it’s old. All eyes are on the new shiny toy we don’t know we need. Woe the Hollywood thriller that wants to be techno hip, and takes a year to gestate before jumping into a theatrical pool already looking at NetFlix. “Paranoia” never stood a chance. We are tasked to root for a Brooklyn hotshot engineer (Liam Hemsworth, vibing like he’s never seen New York) who crosses the bridge to work for one CEO shark (Gary Oldman) and after a grievous faux pas is strong-armed into working for another Fortune 500 dick (Harrison Ford), with orders to steal wares both soft and hard. The drama tries to spook us with the notion that Big Business will always lurk … in a reality where we now the NSA is monitoring this review as it’s posted. Oldman and Ford square off grand, though no one is thrown off a plane. Damn it. Not even those guys can get past creaky dialogue and scenes where the duped-but-loyal girlfriend (Amber Heard) realizes her iPhone is missing and runs to dial her landline. Expiration date: Ancient. C-

The Rum Diary (2011)

I discovered something about myself not too far into “The Rum Diary,” the latest gonzo tale by and about journalist/novelist/debaucherist Hunter S. Thompson, who never met an alcoholic drink or illicit drug he didn’t like. Correction, I learned something about Johnny Depp. He’s the star here. See, I have grown tired of Depp as an actor.

After watching “Pirates of the Caribbean: Are they Still Making These Things?,” I realized he no longer is an ace actor game at playing emotionally aloof rascals who involve themselves in dangerous games, but standoff at a safe distance. He has become an emotionally aloof actor involving himself in big films, but stands off at a safe distance. “The Tourist” more than fits that bill. His characters are no longer the ones who don’t give a shit, now it’s Depp himself.

Here, a journalism/discovery-of-self drama set in 1960 Puerto Rico from a HST novel, he plays Paul Kemp, a failed novelist who gets mixed up in a dying newspaper rag (headed by Richard Jenkins) and a corrupt real estate deal (headed by Aaron Eckhart), and must dig himself out. Between hits of rum and mescaline drops.

Depp lazily walks all over the film blasé style, hiding behind sunglasses, rather than the Captain Jack eye liner, and making jokes about mermaids (too soon) and dishing out that “Whoa, can you believe this?” double jerk take reaction he does without end. (He seems only jazzed by Tim Burton films.) Paul is supposed to be enraged by film’s end, but he barely ever registers a pulse. Ink and rage? Zzzzz. When the plot’s air leaks out of the bag and Paul leaves the scene with a defeated shrug, we have to rely on an end credit’s title scroll to tell us, “No, really, this Kemp guy is important! He did things!” From the sights on screen, I would never have guessed it. Not in 1,000 tries.

As the sexy femme fatale that messes with Kemp’s head and other body parts, Amber Heard is the only pulsating person on screen, seconded by Michael Rispoli as an overweight photojournalist comic foil, and the only guy on screen with a heart. They are the rum shots in this watered down drink. C+