Their time together with their 6-year-old son Luke (Ty Simpkins) is so brief, it’s hard to establish their parental bonds.Ĭasting is another puzzle. A restaurant scene prior to Lara’s arrest suggests the couple might be on the outs. Haggis doesn’t provide the standard motivation of undying love. The Next Three Days is intriguingly not like that - at least until the third act, when the cops of Pittsburgh suddenly turn into regular Sherlocks and the movie makes an unseemly sprint to the finish line. His Oscar-winning Crash was rife with coincidences - people had a habit of running into each other - and his screenwriting gigs with the 007 films Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace were obliged to follow a formula where incredible things occur on cue. He doles out the red herrings, which tease right from the start, but he’s stingy with the convenient coincidences that are so common to the genre, and to some of his past work. Revising a 2008 French film by Fred Cavayé that had a much more direct intent and title ( Anything for Her), Haggis is determined not to spoon-feed the story. A coat with tell-tale bloodstains seems to give the game away. He sets out to learn these criminal acts after his wife Lara (Elizabeth Banks) is sent to prison for a murder he’s convinced she didn’t commit, but which the viewer is less than certain about. He’s Pittsburgh literature professor John Brennan, who knows a lot about tilting at windmills in Don Quixote but not very much about obtaining illegal guns, faking I.D., breaking into jail and evading police. Russell Crowe is the careful worker in The Next Three Days, but he’s by no means a master of his pursuit. The payoff was in the polishing, not the final pop. Paul Haggis gets us so engrossed watching the gears slowly mesh in his prison-break drama The Next Three Days, it’s disconcerting when the machine finally clanks noisily into action.įor the most part it’s a film of measured pace and careful reveals, not unlike Anton Corbijn’s recent The American, in which George Clooney played a master weapons builder meticulously crafting a weapon for a vaguely defined illicit job.
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