24 Hours to Live

 24 Hours to live doesn't make a great first impression. Warning bells were set off by a Chinese production logo at the start - I love Chinese cinema (and I've got the write-ups to prove it!*) but their western co-productions seem, in my experience, to play it safe and skew to the sort of extremely dumb and crass would-be-blockbuster crap I tend to get very annoyed at. Think The Meg, with Meg 2 as the exception that proves the rule.
 The other early warning sign is a prologue where an Interpol convoy transporting an American whistleblower (Tyrone Keogh) who's about to present a declaration against a powerful PMC. They get attacked at a checkpoint between South Africa and Namibia, and the agent in charge, Lin, (Qing Xu) and the prisoner barely make it out alive.
 It's a fine action sequence, with lots of shooting and a couple of really good stunts. But... it's choppy - very choppy, to the point where you can barely see one of its best stunts (a guy climbs onto a car and then gets thrown off when it crashes). Not a good precedent on a movie that bills itself as Ethan Hawke's John Wick.

 Then the movie proper begins, and most of my reservations melted away. We're introduced to Hawke's character (going by the excellent action movie moniker Travis Conrad) as he's bantering drunkenly with his father in law (holy shit, it's Rutger Hauer!) on a beach. After some (pretty funny) back and forth, they work up the will to do what they're there for: to spread the ashes of Travis's wife and son, who've died a year prior. Unfortunately Hauer barely appears after that; I'd watch the hell out of these two talking shit for ninety minutes.

 But the plot must go on, and the movie goes about this business efficiently. Travis senses trouble when two thugs enter the strip club he's buying coke at, and preemptively ambushes them in a pretty funny scene where he locks them in a bathroom and incapacitates them with cleaning products out of a janitor's closet (I'm guessing he mixes bleach with ammonia - I did that once by mistake, and yeah, I totally buy that it could be weaponized).
 He runs into his handler (Paul Anderson) at the bar when he returns from the incident with the thugs; turns out they were just there to set up the meeting, I guess? As established by the way he dealt with those two, Travis is an assassin - the best in the business, of course - and his new job (pay: 1M/day, courtesy of the ever-present PMC) is to hunt down the whistleblower from the prologue and end him.

 The way he does this is by seducing agent Lin - a very clever scene where he uses the information he's got on her to subtly win her over. Also, this is fucking Ethan Hawke with charm turned to 11 we're talking about, so all the footwork and hacking was probably superfluous. But it's still appreciated.
 I'd just like to say that the script for the movie (by Ron Mita, Jim McClain and Zach Dean) is pretty damn on point, especially for a VoD action movie like this; It's got its problems, but when it's good, it's really good. And while we're doing an aside: Qing Xu is great- very charismatic, and we get to see a few sides to her character. Unfortunately she doesn't get that much to do, she's just an accessory to Travis's story. A redemption hook.
 Ahem! In any case, Travis is about to kill Lin as she's in the shower next morning - even has one of those gotcha scenes where he goes through and then we see he was just planning how'd it go - but decides against it and sneaks out instead. Bad idea: Lin (I guess) notices he hacked her phone, tracks him down, and after a short (and very cool) shootout, puts two bullets in his chest.

 So here's the twist in the movie, and this will be a spoiler if you haven't seen its trailers or read its premise (just skip until after the picture): he gets brought back by techs from the PMC that hired him - they've been developing a way to bring soldiers temporarily back from the dead; This is actually what the whistleblower was going to testify about, as they unethically (in my opinion) tested the procedure on dozens upon dozens of poor African civilians first ("some real Mengele shit").
 It's only a temporary reprieve from death - Travis has 24 hours before his brain shuts down, and he's given a handy implant in his wrist with a countdown (the script can be pretty dumb). Side effects include hallucinations, which is useful for storytelling purposes, too.
 In any case, the PMC just brought him back to get the location of the whistleblower; They try to get rid of him immediately afterwards, which, if you've seen any amount of action movies, you'll know is a Big Mistake. Faster than you can say "remorseless killer develops a conscience and seeks redemption", Travis kills all the PMC soldiers on the site and sets out to foil their plans to kill Lin and the whistleblower. 

A good boy almost got flattened during the making of this picture.

 What follows is pretty standard action fare, but well made, grounded by some great character work, and with some superb conceptual flourishes. I loved a bit where Travis enlists the help of some civilians to stop the PMC. It's a really dumb setup: Yeah, let's stop a heavily armed military convoy by waving axes and knives at them - but the kicker is that he gets a resurrection-related seizure just before shit hits the fan, and is forced to watch the carnage in slow motion without being able to do anything. There's a bit where a dog almost gets run over when a Humvee drives through house - I hope he got hazard chow. Anyhow, it's a really great scene.

 The movie does run out of steam towards the end, with a very standard and pretty forced final act, but it's still exciting enough, and it comes by it honestly after all the setup the movie went through. Also, there's a callback to that first conversation between Travis and his father in law at the beginning of the movie that's both affecting and hilarious. Yeah, the script is a mixed bag, but there's some really superb writing in there.

 I was really impressed by director Brian Smrz (not a typo). The guy's only ever directed this and another one from 2008 - Hero Wanted, which I should check out sometime - but he's racked up an impressive resumé as a second unit director and stunt coordinator. Like, seriously impressive, in quantity and popularity if not quality. And he handles himself really well here.
 The action here is not quite up to the standards of the 87North production the movie's marketing invokes, but it's still really good modern action. Shootouts improve a lot after the one in the prologue, with a little more clarity, and the bullets causing an impressive amount of destruction - at one point a sniper uses a gun to shoot multiple people clear across a room. There's also some impressive vehicular action. I'm less enamored of the digital blood and a hilariously bad explosion close to the end, but that's all easily excusable given the budget.

 Other than that it's a well-shot, expansive movie with great cinematography (by Ben Nott) and a little world-hopping flair. It's not quite Ethan Hawke's John Wick - probably something more like Ethan Hawke's The Accountant - but it's still a great action movie with some excellent drama, way better than my glib comparison makes it sound like. And at the heart of it lies an outstanding performance from Hawke, a great actor who's always willing to give it his all for interesting genre stuff. One of the good guys.

* Chist, I sound racist... "Some of my best friends are Chinese movies!"