24 Hours to Live  (Theaters-2017; Streaming-2017)  Rated: R  Runtime: 92-93 minutes

Genre: Action-Mystery-Thriller

els – 5.5/10

IMDb – 5.8/10

Amazon – 3.6/5 stars

Rotten Tomatoes Critics – 4.2/10

Rotten Tomatoes Audience – 3.0/5

Metacritic Metascore – 38/100

Metacritic User Score – 5.8/10

Directed by:  Brian Smrz

Written by:  Zach Dean, Jim McClain, Ron Mita

Music by:  Tyler Bates

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

Film Locations:  South Africa, Hong Kong, USA

Budget:  NA

Travis Conrad (Hawke) is an assassin, on sabbatical or as he states, a ‘hiatus’ from Red Mountain, a mercenary and security firm; a fictional representation of the real world Blackwater. He is re-activated by the company for an urgent time-sensitive task. His new mission is to eliminate a former Red Mountain employee who is going to testify against his employer; stating under oath that Red Mountain conducted Mengele-like medical experiments on scores of South African subjects.

The experiments were attempts to bring the dead back to life, and they succeeded, although success was bought with a costly, and gruesome, high body count.  Conrad, while tracking the rogue employee is killed, but is re-animated by the same back-from-the-dead procedures that Red Mountain has pioneered.  The catch is that there are some rather unpleasant side effects and the process is only good for 24 hours at which point he dies again.

This is a fun movie with lots of shooting, bullets, and bloody deaths. No hidden messages except the usual boiler plate of corporate boogeymen and anything for a buck, but that’s really not hidden; it’s full on in your face. This is Brian Smrz’s sophomore attempt at direction and he keeps it coarse with no frills, no long drawn out drama scenes to distract from what this movie is: an action movie.  The story holds together, it’s sparse and the actors give all that it takes to keep this movie going without any cringe worthy line delivers. The only negative is that Rutger Hauer was under utilized.  He could have brought more color to the film’s main sequences but the writers left him in a side story role, which was too bad.