I didn’t know what to expect when I went to see The Next Three Days, having not seen any reviews, but the one trailer I had seen looked promising.
The 2010 thriller film directed by Paul Haggis stars Russell Crowe and Elizabeth Banks. It may be advisable for Paul Haggis to stick to screenwriting, as this motion picture was a slapdash congregation of Banks’ dry acting and an unnecessary amount of close-ups of Russell Crowe’s face. The plot, that was very slow in developing, seemed like a waste of talent as it did not allow for Crowe to deliver the same level of performance that we saw in some of his other recent films, such as American Gangster and Robin Hood.
Russell Crowe plays the part of John Brennan; A college professor who makes an unrealistic bid to break his wife out of jail after she is wrongly accused of murder and given a 20 year sentence. The film took a long time to deliver any amount of thrill, but the last half an hour delivered in full what the first two hours failed to. It was a saving grace to anyone who had the patience to endure the first two hours of linear and uninteresting plot development. The film’s fanciful plot summed up how an ordinary man is capable of juggling his job and looking after his son, while becoming a master escape artist and saving his wife from prison. It even put into layman’s terms how to make a bump key for opening most pin tumbler locks, and an interesting method of breaking into cars using nothing more than a tennis ball.
One scene that stood out involved the College professor dad shooting up a dealer’s house that doubles as a meth lab, and murdering a dealer, becoming guilty of the same crime his wife was wrongly accused of; a hypocritical flaw that reoccurs in the plot. After buying drugs, breaking into vans, consorting with unscrupulous characters, shooting up a meth lab, stealing thousands of dollars in drug money and breaking his wife out of jail, it becomes apparent that no one is more deserving of a hefty prison sentence than him; which makes the ease of the couples escape from the country slightly farfetched. It came as no surprise that Elizabeth Banks tried throwing herself from their car in a suicide attempt, her second in the film, during their escape. If I was watching this film in a car I’d be considering the same alternative.
This is one film I won’t be buying on DVD.
