Director – Brian Smrz, Screenplay – Zach Dean, Jim McClain & Ron Mita, Producers – Mark Gao, Basil Iwanyk & Gregory Quanhon, Photography – Ben Nott, Music – Tyler Bates, Visual Effects Supervisor – David Nelson, Visual Effects – Black Ginger (Supervisor – Marc Bloch & Marco Raposo Del Barbosa) & Iloura (Supervisor – Jason Billington), Special Effects Supervisor – Cordell McQueen, Production Design – Colin Gibson. Production Company – Fundamental Films/Thunder Road.
Cast
Ethan Hawke (Travis Conrad), Xu Qing (Lin Bisset), Paul Anderson (Jim Morrow), Liam Cunningham (Wetzler), Rutger Hauer (Frank), Tyrone Keogh (Keith Zara), Natalie Boltt (Dr Helen), Hakeem Kae-Kazim (Amahle), Brendan Murray (Zee), Jeremy Young (Christopher Bisset), Owen De Wet (Adam Conrad), Jenna Upton (Kate Conrad)
Plot
Travis Conrad is brought out of retirement to work an operation for the private security company Red Mountain with the offer of two million dollars a day. He is to eliminate Keith Zara who is about to give important testimony. Travis travels to Cape Town and seduces Keith’s Interpol minder Lin Bisset. However, she detects his ruse and shoots him in the morning. Travis comes around, having been revived from the dead by Red Mountain’s advanced technology, although this only gives him 24 hours to live as measured by a digital readout implanted on his wrist. Travis breaks out of the hospital and sets out to stop the assassination. He is able to rescue Lin. However, Travis’s old friend Jim Morrow snatches Lin’s son and demands the return of the tape that has damning evidence about Red Mountain’s human experiments. Travis sets out with the time he has left to bring Red Mountain down.
The plot of 24 Hours to Live is a standard variant on the film noir thriller D.O.A. (1950) in which Edmond O’Brien is poisoned and has only several days to solve his own murder. This has been remade several times since and the basic premise where the person with a matter of days/hours left to live must solve a mystery, usually their own murder, has been borrowed by other films. In this case, it is pumped up into an Action Film with Ethan Hawke’s burned-out assassin turning on his own people and bringing the corrupt corporation down in bullets and flames.
There is a minor SF element to the plot – where Ethan Hawke is shot early in the piece and is resurrected by some handwave process called The Lazarus Unit and a digital readout of the time he has left is implanted in his wrist. However, the fine details of this process are unspecified and this is dwelt on no more than what the film needs to get its premise up and running.
Ethan Hawke in action
In terms of what Brian Smrz specialises in, 24 Hours to Live is streamlined and polished and does exactly what it sets out to do. It delivers expert action sequences – from the opening shootout at the Namibian border to the attack on the Interpol interview by high-power rifles and the vehicular flight through the streets of Cape Town to Ethan Hawke’s invasion of Red Mountain headquarters at the climax. In all of these, Brian Smrz delivers satisfyingly and with considerable kinetic punch. The disappointment is that the whole of 24 Hours to Live can be digested and then forgotten five minutes later.
The film has some good actors in roles that require little of them. Ethan Hawke is buffed and in shape but is still a hard stretch of believability as a Schwarzenegger-esque one-man army. Paul Anderson makes for reasonable villainous threat but is outshone by Liam Cunningham who needed to be on the screen far more than he ends up being. A 73-year-old Rutger Hauer, in one of his last films, has a couple of scenes as Ethan Hawke’s father-in-law who proceeds to eliminate two assassins sent after him.
