One of the strictures of the old Motion Picture Production Code was that “methods of crime should not be explicitly presented” and that in particular, “theft, robbery, safe-cracking, and dynamiting of trains, mines, buildings, etc., should not be detailed in method.” The censors of the Hays Office did not want motion pictures to become teaching materials for criminals. The Next Three Days, a new thriller written and directed by Paul Haggis, is in many respects an old-fashioned movie but also amounts to a kind of cinematic “Illegal Activity for Dummies.”
Or maybe a violent, feature-length version of one of those once-hot cable television makeover shows. Here, a regular guy named John (Russell Crowe) is transformed into a scheming mastermind, planning and executing not a simple safe-cracking but rather a daring and logistically complex jailbreak. He doesn’t acquire the requisite skills by watching movies, though. That’s what the Internet is for. This unassuming Pittsburgh dad — he makes his living mumbling about Don Quixote to students at a local community college — combs YouTube for videos showing how to forge skeleton keys and break into cars with a tennis ball. On Amazon, he tracks down the memoir of a man who broke out of seven prisons, then goes to interview the guy, played by Liam Neeson with a dodgy Brooklyn accent, a decorative scar and a thousand-yard stare.
John’s actions, which bring him into contact with all kinds of nasty characters (including drug dealers played by RZA and Kevin Corrigan) and eventually arouse the suspicions of the police (mainly Aisha Hinds, Jason Beghe and Allan Steele), are certainly not what you would expect of a college instructor played by anyone other than Crowe. Our man’s motives, however, could hardly be more noble. One fine morning, John’s wife, Lara (Elizabeth Banks), is snatched up by the cops and hauled off to jail, charged with murdering the boss she had argued with the night before.
Photo: BLOOMBERG
Three years pass quickly (in about 15 minutes of screen time), and by the time his wife’s last appeal has been denied, John, certain of her innocence, finds himself driven to an extreme and elaborate display of spousal loyalty. He takes pictures, draws maps, buys a gun and some false passports, and plans a one-man assault on the Allegheny County Jail. Their young son, Luke (Ty Simpkins), wonders what Dad is up to, but he never raises a fuss. John’s parents (Helen Carey and Brian Dennehy) accept spontaneous baby-sitting assignments without complaint.
In his quiet, brooding roles (of which this is surely one), Crowe carries the possibility of violence coiled within him, and one of the problems with The Next Three Days is that John’s menace and desperation are visible from the start, so that the occasional displays of uncertainty and anxiety are not quite convincing. Nor, when you stop to think about it, is most of the rest of the movie, which remakes a 2008 French movie called Pour Elle. I don’t mean that the story is implausible — if I were a professor in Pittsburgh with a diabetic wife in the hoosegow, I would certainly figure out how to falsify her medical records — but rather that all the emphasis on technique starves the drama of psychological intensity.
What about Lara? The structure of the film, which skips over the details of the trial and flashes back teasingly to the crime itself, allows for some ambiguity about her guilt. But Banks is never given enough time on-screen to complete the portrait that might make this uncertainty mean something. Is this woman capable of bludgeoning someone to death with a fire extinguisher? The court says yes, her husband says no, but Haggis does not let us see the shadows of her personality that would make this argument interesting.
Nor does he exploit the absurdist, almost comic themes that are latent in the film’s premise. An intellectual with a closet full of corduroy jackets and a Prius is transformed by Kafkaesque circumstances into an outlaw — there is all kinds of potential here, but Haggis lacks the Hitchcockian sense of mischief to make it blossom. His work as a director (Crash, In the Valley of Elah) and as a screenwriter (Million Dollar Baby) has never been distinguished by humor, and that, somewhat paradoxically, is what a movie like The Next Three Days needs if it is to be taken seriously. Otherwise it’s not much more than a meticulously detailed, very long instructional video.
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