Year:  2018

Director:  Brian Smrz

Rated:  MA15+

Release:  August 16, 2018

Distributor: Sony

Running time: 89 minutes

Worth: $14.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth

Cast:
Ethan Hawke, Xu Qing, Liam Cunningham, Rutger Hauer, Paul Anderson

Intro:
...pretty perfect beer and pizza action fodder.

The second film from stunt guru turned director Brian Smrsz(not a typo), 24 Hours to Live plays out like a cross between Taken and D.O.A., with a little bit of The Crow thrown in for good measure – and to good effect.

Ethan Hawke is Travis Conrad, a former assassin wallowing in booze, drugs and grief following the death of his wife and son, when he’s hauled back into the underworld for One Last Job – fingering a whistleblower and taking out his Interpol assigned protector, Lin (Xu Qing). Things go awry with fatal results, and Travis (cool name, by the way) wakes up on an operating table to learn he’s been resurrected from the dead through some arcane science – but only for 24 hours.

The reason for his rising is that he knows the location of the safehouse where the snitch has been stashed, but Travis has had a bit of a change of heart during his sojourn in the afterlife and it’s not long before he’s blasting his way through his former workmates in the mercenary trade to protect his former targets – and then to rescue Li’s young son when the villains kidnap him.

24 Hours to Live is a brisk, efficient, always entertaining action sprint that never wastes too much time. Smrs, whose stunt career began with 1983’s Taps and has worked as a second unit director on Iron Man 3, Terminator Genisys, The Predator, and more, mounts his combat sequences with unfussy flair; brutal fights are carried out with maximum efficiency, with Hawke giving a good account for himself as he shoots, stabs and batters his way through the unfortunate day players in his path.

He’s an interesting choice for this sort of thing, imbuing Travis with a mournful, existential quality. With a Willis or even a Neeson in the central role, 24 Hours to Live would be a different and less successful affair. Hawke elevates the material by never leaning into the macho posturing that the genre invites, instead playing his tortured, self-flagellating character straight.

Game of Thrones veteran Liam Cunningham crops up in a villainous role – the kind of part he can do in his sleep these days, and action connoisseurs will be overjoyed to find B move legend Rutger Hauer on hand for a couple of key scenes.

24 Hours to Live occasionally overplays its hand when it tries to get metaphysical, with Travis seeing visions of his dead son, and when it spends too much time delving into the backstory between our hero and his old gun buddy, Jim (Paul Anderson), who is now, as is common in this kind of genre exercise, Cunningham’s chief henchman.

Those minor stumbles aside, 24 Hours to Live is pretty perfect beer and pizza action fodder. It doesn’t rewrite the playback, it just adheres to it really, really well.

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