Rent 24 Hours to Live (2017)

24 Hours to Live review by Mark McPherson - Cinema Paradiso

Ethan Hawke has come a long ways from his earlier days as a youthful actor to more esteemed roles in award-worthy productions of Boyhood and First Reformed. This is why it’s a little disconcerting to see him in such a direct-to-video action picture as 24 Hours To Live, one part sci-fi tech thriller and one part generic run-and-gun action standard. Hawke does his best with the material but I can’t help looking at this lacking script and wished he would’ve tossed it on over to Bruce Willis or Sam Worthington for an easy paycheck. He’s too good for this material.

Hawke plays Travis Conrad, a former hitman who quit the business after his wife and child died. He puts that killing lifestyle in a box but the military corporation known as Red Mountain convince him to take that profession back out of the closet. The company needs to silence a whistleblower of their actions, a target known as Keith. To get to Keith, Conrad seduces his protecting Interpol agent, Lin. All seems to be going according to plan except Conrad is a little bit rusty and ends up dead.

But the story doesn’t end there. Red Mountain won’t allow it. They have the technology to revive the seasoned hitman, but not to make him faster and stronger. In fact, he only has about 24 hours to live, which I suppose Red Mountain feels is just enough time for him to complete his mission. But having been brought back from the dead, he can feel the other side calling him as he is haunted by visions of his dead family. Having been pulled away from them, Conrad decides to switch sides because, hey, it seems more noble to take down a big corporation messing with this kind of death-defying tech.

24 Hours To Live is the sort of meat and potatoes low-rent picture. This can be seen in everything from the muddy locations and generic gun-toting madness to the digital clock that can be seen gleaming through the skin of his arm. In terms of action, however, it’s not too shabby. There’s some intense car chases that are staged well with lots of scraping paint, gunfire, and frantic speeding. Conrad will later have a showdown where he tempts fate and his somewhat willing nature to sacrifice himself results in a brutal battle of guns versus machetes. Even the grand climax of Hawke going on one last slaughter of the head hauncho at Red Mountain has its little moments of brilliance amid the all-too-familiar gruff and armed nature of an action scene more clinical than gritty.

I wish I could love this film more because Hawke has a certain knack for out-there concepts that he gleefully dives into with brilliant earnest. He brings that familiar sense of seriousness needed to make such a concept as this work. But he can only do so much when the direction feels so standard for a premise that should be anything but. And it’s unfortunate that because of this staging 24 Hours To Live will only remain lightly notable in the mind for a few action sequences and Hawke’s acting before it drifts away from my memory, lost in a sea of other direct-to-video action pictures.