REVIEW: Russell Crowe Tries to Roughen the Edges of The Next Three Days
Blood on a trench coat, a wholesome-seeming wife and mom behind bars, a spouse who's devoted almost to the point of obsession: Paul Haggis' marital thriller The Next Three Days has a lot going for it, including two appealing and extremely capable actors, Russell Crowe and Elizabeth Banks. The plot is worked out with care, and it takes its time, unapologetically, in a manner that's perfectly suited to thinking adults. The whole enterprise reeks of class.
And that right there is the problem. There's enough intrigue in The Next Three Days -- which is based on the 2008 French film Pour Elle, starring Diane Kruger -- to keep us guessing what might happen next, partly because Haggis is miserly when it comes to doling out significant information: He give us time to ask questions before he answers them, which is something of a rarity in contemporary thrillers. The movie opens with Russell Crowe's character (we don't yet know who he is or what on Earth he's doing) driving away from somewhere (a crime scene, perhaps?), occasionally glancing back to reckon with what appears to be a wounded passenger in the backseat. Next we see Crowe's character, who's named John, at a restaurant gathering, tamping down an escalating argument between a woman who, we learn, is his wife, Lara (Elizabeth Banks), and his brother's sexy, saucy girlfriend. John and Lara leave the restaurant, pawing at each other almost before they've gotten into their car: They have a toddler son at home, but the movie wants to make it clear that these two are still gettin' it on.
Early the next morning, though, their happy little world is turned up-side-down: Cops burst into the house and arrest Lara for murder, just after she's surreptitiously removed that blood-stained coat from a hook in the hallway and started scrubbing at it in the sink. What is going on here? John has no idea, either. Fast-forward a few years -- the couple's son, Luke (Ty Simpkins), is now just starting school -- and Lara is still in the clink, pawing at John lasciviously whenever he comes to visit her. She seems to miss her son, too, pretty much. But when Luke accompanies his dad on these jail visits, he pointedly ignores her, fixing his attention on crayons, Legos, Tinkertoys, anything but his mother's face. Mom's a jailbird, dammit. And what six-year-old likes that?
That's barely the pointy tip of the corkscrew of events that The Next Three Days leads off with. As it turns out, Lara just may be in jail for life: A whiskery, earnest Daniel Stern, looking extremely lawyerlike, breaks the bad news to John, trying to impress upon him that no matter how much he may believe in his wife's innocence, the evidence is stacked against her. But John is a dreamer and a schemer -- he teaches English at the local community college, and Haggis makes it clear just how much he identifies with the subject of one of his texts, Don Quixote. And so John hatches a plan to break Lara out of the hoosegow, so they can have mad, passionate sex in the car again.
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Russel Crow, Denzel Washington, Hillary Swank, and Julia Roberts are the kiss of death for a movie for me. I just can't.
As much as I enjoyed Inception, Stephanie, I was very much on your side during the entirely pointless (and frighteningly fervent) crazy-person-commenter-backlash that resulted from your unfavorable review of that film on this website.
But 7 1/2 stars for this illogical Haggis-tripe? All I can say about that is...
That I continue to support free speech and an open dialogue about all works of art and that internet commenters can be super creepy.
Yes, Elizabeth Banks is very appealing. Russell Crowe, however? Incredibly, insanely unappealing. Like he is literally the reason I don't want to see this-even though I enjoyed your review.
Elizabeth Banks' character is such a bitch in this film, if she were my wife I would have gone through all that trouble to get her INTO prison, not get her out.
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