N || The Next Three Days || Review

Review by Jason Venter
March 20, 2011
Tweet

Lara Brennan (Elizabeth Banks) had a volatile personality. She argued with her family members, who she loved, and she argued passionately with her boss, who she did not love. The morning after her argument with her boss, Lara was in the bathroom washing blood off the back of her business jacket when police officers barged through the front door, subdued her startled husband and wrestled her out of her home while her boy sat crying at the breakfast table. It was not a good morning for Lara Brennan.

“The Next Three Days” isn’t really telling Lara Brennan’s story, though. It’s telling the story of her husband, John Brennan (Russell Crowe). John knows his wife and he knows that despite her passion, she is not a murderer. She is his port in a storm and he is determined to exhaust every legal process that he can in the effort to secure her release from prison. Given the overwhelming evidence against her, all circumstantial but all damning, it isn’t long before she runs out of appeals. John’s sympathetic lawyer (Daniel Stern) advises him that “she’s not getting out.”

John makes a promise to Lara, though, even if she herself does not believe it. “This will not be your life,” he tells her through the plate glass window at the correctional institution, and he spends most of the movie making sure that the promise isn’t a lie.

“The Next Three Days” is, as a result, a generally boring movie. Those who love character studies will no doubt delight in the spectacular performances throughout. Russell Crowe knows how to make people care for his character, whoever that character might be, and his turn as a community college instructor with unfaltering commitment to his wife is sympathetic nearly to a fault. He even turns down advances of a sort from his very single, very interested and astonishingly beautiful neighbor (Olivia Wilde). He deals directly with a dangerous segment of the population that you’d never expect to see him interact with and he spends a lot of time on the internet or scouting locations crucial to an eventual attempt to break out his wife.

The problem is that very little of that is particularly interesting, even though it’s credible. “The Next Three Days” spends nearly two and a half hours covering a period of roughly three years, with perhaps half of its focus placed on those critical three days. Writer and director Paul Haggis expanded on the 2008 French film “Anything for Her” by adding nearly an hour of personality development that made the story his own, but it’s unlikely that many action movie fans will appreciate those efforts.

Action fans tend to like explosions and high-speed chases and such. Most of the content along those lines that you see here found its way into the script because it was part of the original film. Haggis was more interested in exploring the emotional impact that a raid on a drug house has on Brennan than he was ratcheting up the tension. You’re expected as a viewer to get more mileage out of Brennan’s deteriorating system of values and his everyman personality than you are the chase sequences that fill the last few moments of the movie.

“The Next Three Days” is a successful film, then, one that gives Russell Crowe and others the opportunity to show how capable they are when it comes time to portray characters with depth and humanity, but the success feels like a misfire just the same. A single viewing is more than enough.

Rating:

Reader Comments