The Next Three Days

The Next Three Days is one of those films that you can dig while watching it: It's nicely paced, well acted, and has some genuine suspense. It's only that it's over that the "wait a minutes" come out, and you realize how ludicrous it is.

Russell Crowe and Elizabeth Banks star as a normal couple with a young son. She's tried and convicted for murder, as the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming. All of this happens in about the first fifteen minutes, as the rest is Crowe, realizing the appeal process is over, plots to break her out of prison.

Written and directed by Paul Haggis, in a film that is a departure for him in that it's not political and/or pretentious, seems to say that good old-fashioned book learnin' can solve anything. You see, Crowe is a professor (but a community college!) and he researches everything from skeleton keys to how to break into a car with a tennis ball from the Internet. In a deft cameo, he interviews Liam Neeson as a man who has broken out of prison seven times.

The planning process takes up much of the film, and it's mostly intriguing. A needless scene has Crowe robbing a drug dealer for some much-needed cash, I guess to establish that he's willing to kill to get his wife out, but the scene just seemed tawdry to me. Much better is the last half-hour, in the type of thing I love--the couple play cat and mouse with police as they attempt to get out of the city and then out of the country.

Of course all of this is impossible, and relies on Hollywood luck and the notion that the heroes will of course get away, which lessens the suspense. It's based on a French film--I wonder if they got away in that one.

The interesting thing about the casting is that Crowe plays a mild-mannered man, and he does it quite well. I wouldn't think of him first or even a hundredth for playing a professor who teaches Don Quixote. I guess I have to admit that the guy is a pretty good actor, although his projects since his three Academy Award nominations in a row from 1999 to 2001 (excepting for Master and Commander) haven't been the top-shelf stuff.