The Next Three Days (2010)

Have you ever loved someone so much it turned you lawless? John Brennan, the hero of the Russell Crowe vehicle The Next Three Days, has. In it, Crowe plays a tweed-and-corduroy-wearing professor at a Pittsburgh community college with a pretty young wife, Lara (Elizabeth Banks), and young son, Luke (Ty Simpkins). The three lead an idyllic existence until the police arrest Lara for the murder of her boss, with whom she had a very public argument.

At this point, writer-director Paul Haggis puts three years on the clock. In his adaptation for American audiences of the two-year-old French film Pour Elle, he skips over the pesky details of the trial and the crime, showing us Lara in jail after her conviction. The years count down, with appeal after appeal being denied and the couple’s blond moppet growing distant and reserved from his orange-jumpsuit-wearing mother.

We have learned from urban legends about moms lifting cars off of their imperiled infants that human beings have an acute sense of survival. Backed against the wall and facing seemingly insurmountable odds, we have the capacity to go to extraordinary measures. So if Lara had orchestrated this prison break to be with her husband and son or to prove her innocence, The Next Three Days would have fit neatly into the molds of, say, The Fugitive, The Count of Monte Christo, or even Double Jeopardy. Rooting for momma bear’s teary reunion with her cub and for some smug, small-minded gumshoe to get his comeuppance would have been effortless.

But it is John, not Lara, who goes rogue. After Lara tries to commit suicide, he decides that he’s got to bust her out of the clink, getting involved with seedy underworld types (Liam Neeson, RZA and Kevin Corrigan, among them) to secure a gun, doctored passports, and extra cash. When John finds out that his wife will be getting moved to a more secure location with just three days notice, it’s time to set his plan into motion.

For the audience, getting on board with the plan of The Next Three Days requires Herculean feats of suspension of disbelief. Wife in the big house or not, it takes more than just extraordinary circumstances to uproot one’s comfortable, suburb-dwelling, Prius-driving existence for a life of crime.

That would take a love the size (and most likely the codependency level) of Bonnie and Clyde’s or Thelma and Louise’s. But Haggis doesn’t give us more than a first-act sex scene in the aforementioned environmentally responsible vehicle to prove that love. We’re left to simply accept that even though he’s got a whole life, including a son who needs him and another romantic option in the mother of Luke’s playground playmate (Olivia Wilde, pretty but otherwise useless here), John would rather lie, steal, and even kill to be with a woman whose innocence is completely ambiguous until the film’s end. Haggis doesn’t answer the question of her guilt until a five-minute post-script to the film that feels tacked on and unsatisfying.

That is not a man who has any right to be rearing a child.

With all the bending over backward to ignore a patently unbelievable premise, the film’s try-to-get-out-of-this twists, ridiculously fortuitous timing of events, and too-quirky criminal types–why are Neeson and his atrocious Brooklyn accent in this film at all–are simply unbearable. Also unbearable: Haggis and cinematographer Stephane Fontaine’s (whose much better work can be seen in last year’s A Prophet) frequent use of jarringly tight close-ups of Crowe’s deer-in-the-headlights face and newly acquired jowls.

To their credit, Crowe and Banks try to infuse a little interest to their characters. Banks, who usually stars in much lighter comedic material, showcases a temper and an edginess that lends to her character’s ambiguity. Meanwhile, Crowe keeps what could have careened into an out-of-control nutjob of a character buttoned up, perhaps too much so.

One scene, in which John is lecturing his students on Don Quixote, is meant to be the character’s turning-point decision to descend into the criminal underworld. But instead of playing it with outlandish chivalry to parallel Don Quixote’s–or to match the rest of the film’s outlandishness–Crowe plays it with a broken and resigned whimper. That could only be to parallel to how you’ll feel having wasted 122 minutes on The Next Three Days.