Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
11/28/10
I've
never quite understood the sentiment that one has nothing to fear if you
haven't done anything wrong: that notion should have gone out the
window the day the first innocent person was exonerated and released from
prison. But in the years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a combination
of legitimate security concerns, knee-jerk wishful thinking and corporate
profiteering (Former Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff sits on the
board of or consults for pretty much every company whose products he tells
us we need to defend the country) has made every citizen a terror suspect
at all times, making it harder than ever to believe the innocent have nothing
to fear. That's probably why we see the resurgence of those 70's-era
thrillers where the common man must cast off his delusions of law and civilization
to save his family. The Next Three Days lets writer/director
Paul Haggis take his crack at the subgenre, asking mild-mannered community
college professor Russell Crowe to remake himself as a violent criminal
to bust his wife out of prison. A fairly solid genre tale is filled
out with the sort of bet-hedging half measures that mar most of Haggis'
work, and I would certainly not suggest attempting the dreadful prison
break plan enacted in the climax. But performances are solid across
the board and The Next Three Days ends up as a fairly diverting
thriller.
John
(Russell Crowe) and Lara Brennan (Elizabeth Banks) return home from a contentious
dinner with John's brother (Michael Buie) and his wife (Moran Atias) discussing
a fight Lara had with her boss that day. The following morning, while
they're eating breakfast with their son Luke (twins Toby and Tyler Green),
the police knock down the door and arrest Lara. It seems her boss
was murdered after work the day before, Lara's fingerprints were on the
murder weapon and a witness places her at the scene. Three years
later, she's in jail and the last of her appeals is playing out.
John goes about the tough business of raising Luke (now Ty Simpkins) on
his own until that appeal is denied and Lara tries to kill herself.
It's then that he decides to overturn her life sentence himself, meeting
with Damon Pennington (Liam Neeson), who broke out of prison seven times,
for advice on how to do the deed himself. He begins the lengthy process
of laying out his plan, raising money for it and securing all the illegal
documents he'll need. That's the tough part: a man like John
doesn't even know where to begin finding an honest criminal and soon he
can't hide the very visible beatings he's taken when he guesses wrong.
But he's running out of time: Lara's going to be moved to another
facility in three days and he's already gone too far to start over planning
at a new prison. It's now or never, and a dogged cop (Lennie James)
is closing in fast.
The
Next Three Days is the kind of movie for which a three-star rating
was invented because it does just about everything 75% as well as it should.
John is changed by the task he takes on and Lara by prison, but neither
too much so. He must do shocking things to finance and execute his
plan, but not too shocking, and the law and fate throw obstacles in the
path of their escape, but nothing that makes them have to get too winded
on their way out of town. There's a gentility to the way the movie
plays out that will make it play especially well on TV, but while watching
it in a theater, I never felt quite as compelled by the leisurely narrative
as I had hoped.
There
are exceptions: the opening scenes do a great job of making John
and Lara a lively and engaging couple, and Crowe and Banks have great chemistry.
Once she's behind bars, the actors do a terrific job of keeping up appearances,
and there's a great cheerful tension as we wait for one of them to finally
break down. The sequences where John has to drive around the rough
part of town asking random criminal types where he might find a good fake
passport have appropriately high levels of suspense. Neeson is wonderfully
effective in his one scene, setting the stakes for just how difficult a
real prison break would be. And while the movie waits far too long
to introduce James' character given his prominence in the third act, for
a while his pursuit of the chain of evidence is so relentless it seems
that John has no hope of escaping him.
But
for all the trouble the film goes to making getting Lara out of jail sound
impossible, once the plan is set in motion, it proves entirely too easy,
with John's plan revealing one or two clever aspects (loved the bit with
the trash bags), but finding it almost ridiculously simple to surmount
the things that break against it. And Haggis (or his source material,
a French film called Anything for Her) is wrong-headed to borrow
a device from the short-lived TV series Justice, waiting until the
closing moments to reveal in flashback whether Lara is actually guilty
or not. Keeping any doubt in play as to whether she did it is a huge
mistake. While you may scoff at the fact that I considered Haggis
capable of screwing John over with the revelation that he'd been played
for a sucker by his guilty wife, bear in mind that this is the guy who
gave us the most cynical humanist Oscar-winner of all time, Crash.
And if you have even 1% belief that she could be guilty, the lengths to
which John goes to secure her freedom go from compelling to crazy.
While
this is a far better movie, it shares with Crash Haggis' odd tendency
to come at us from both ends of the political spectrum simultaneously,
championing a Freemen-friendly “kill the drug dealers and steal their money”
solution to injustices like wrongful imprisonment and Big Brother-like
police powers. It's funny to see John learn all manner of criminal
talents from YouTube, although I'm still not 100% sure how you open a locked
car door with a tennis ball. Maybe that's for the best.
It's an amusing cultural cross-reference that he casts Brian Dennehy, a
head-knocking icon of a previous generation of wronged man action flicks,
as Crowe's father.
Even
when the pace is a bit slow and the ideology a bit confused, what keeps
The Next Three Days going is its solid cast and the clever roles
Haggis has written for even the smallest characters. Crowe does a
first-rate job supplying the suspense in a lot of scenes with his nervous
twitches, shaking hands and perpetually hanging head. Banks is luminous
in the early scenes and skillfully applies the darker shades the script
permits her while she's locked away. The underrated James makes a
terrific Gerard to Crowe's Kimble, while Olivia Wilde does a great job
fleshing out a concerned neighbor who's mostly on hand as a plot device
so John has someone the police wouldn't think of to pass the kid off to
while he's busting his wife out of jail. I also liked Jason Beghe
and Aisha Hinds as the cops who don't quite care enough to figure out who
killed Lara's boss or what John is up to and Atias steals her couple scenes
at John's utterly annoying sister-in-law.
This
is the first movie I've seen where we're required to hold our breath hoping
the stars make it through a security checkpoint before their faces can
be added to a watch list, but I'm sure it won't be the last. The
Next Three Days isn't a great movie, but it'll do for fans of the genre
and cast until one comes along. Just don't look to it for advice
the next time you need to break someone out of prison. |
