24 Hours to Live (2017)

Brian Smrz's 24 Hours to Live arrives with a title that doubles as a countdown and a business plan. Ethan Hawke plays Travis Conrad, a retired assassin lured back for a million dollars a day, killed, revived by an experimental procedure, and handed a wrist timer that ticks toward his second death. The film was assembled as a Chinese-South African co-production, which explains the presence of Xu Qing as a gun-toting Interpol agent named Lin and a supporting roster drawing on Nigerian-British and South African talent. This is casting by financing arrangement, not by conviction, and the film treats it as such. Lin is competent and central to the plot, though nobody pauses to remark on the significance of it. That silence is welcome.

The villain is a corporation called Red Mountain, which has experimented on more than seventy civilians and buried the evidence. That is a corporate malfeasance thread, and it sits comfortably in the long tradition of action cinema where the bad guy wears a lanyard. No economic argument follows. The South African village where the victims lived gets recruited for a final ambush, a plot convenience dressed as solidarity. There is no engagement with the racial politics of the setting, no environmental sermon, no body-positive messaging, no neurodivergent characters, and no historical claims to revise. The film is a fiction about resurrection and it stays that way.

What moralizing exists is delivered by gunfire. Travis feels remorse for his killings, lets a betrayer live, and dies on schedule, and the film trusts us to absorb this without a speech. The result is a modest, workmanlike thriller with a 52 percent approval rating and $5.8 million in worldwide gross, which is roughly the take of a film that knows exactly what it is. It is not trying to teach us anything. That restraint, in this climate, is almost quaint.