The Next Three Days

Ok so let’s say that your wife or husband gets convicted of a crime and they go to jail.  You don’t know if they really committed that crime or not but the evidence suggests that they actually did do it.  And let’s also say that you can’t appeal your case anymore so your significant other is in jail for life.  You can’t do anything more about it.  Nothing.  They’re in there and they’re never gonna be able to leave.  What would you do in that situation?  Would you say, “he/she’s in prison.  I need to move on with my life and take care of our seven year old child”?  Or would you think to yourself, “the way to remedy this situation is to break my wife/husband out of jail”.  Now call me a boring person but I would go with the former.  However, The Next Three Days goes with the later.

(The rest of this thing is spoiler filled but this movie is goddamn absurd so whatever)

Elizabeth Banks (The 40 Year Old Virgin, Zack and Miri Make a Porno) is the imprisoned wife, Lara, and Russell Crowe (Gladiator, A Beautiful Mind) is John, the husband that can’t stand to see her in there.  Lara is in for murder which took me by surprise.  This is a middle class white family we have here so I thought the charge would have been embezzlement or insider trading or some other white collar crime but in this one it’s murder with a fire extinguisher.  It was Lara’s boss that was killed and there was blood found on her coat and fingerprints on the weapon so it doesn’t look good.  Just to make Lara look even more incriminating, her and her boss fought earlier that day in front of their whole office so it looks like she had a motive.  ‘Cause you know when I argue with someone I like to kill them afterward.  It not only makes me feel a little better but it also eliminates having further arguments with that person in the future.  It’s a win-win really.      

To help formulate a plan John contacts Liam Neeson (Schindler’s List, Darkman) because he broke out of like a million prisons and wrote a book on it ‘n shit.  You know, I remember when I used to like Neeson a lot but he suffers from can’t-pick-a-good-interesting-role-in-an-at-least-decent-movie-to-save-his-life syndrome.  Or it could be I-was-in-Schindler’s-fucking-List-so-give-me-my-paycheck-and-get-off-my-goddamn-back-about-doing-shitty-movies disorder.  Adrian Brody and Ben Kingsly also suffer from either or both of these afflictions.  But in all fairness Brody was the best part of Predators and helped to make that movie not that bad actually.  But Kingsly man, what the fuck are you doing?  Why do you only give a shit once every ten years or so?

They meet up in a bar and Neeson tells John that he has to change who he is if he’s going to go through with this crazy stunt.  He also tells him that the police will be shutting down the city and setting up roadblocks in fifteen minutes or some shit, you’re gonna have to escape to someplace far far away and etc.  You know the drill when it comes to this kind of talk.  But what’s strange is that John asks Neeson how he got caught and Neeson tells him that he turned himself in.  He couldn’t stand living in fear that one day the cops will break down the door and haul his ass back to jail.  But really none of this makes sense because if Neeson broke out five hundred bajillion times or whatever then why is he out now?  Isn’t breaking out of prison illegal?  Don’t you get years added on to your sentence when you do that shit?  Shouldn’t Neeson still be in jail?  Whatever, in a five minute conversation with this one guy John gets all the info he needs to know how to break out of prison and escape the country.  That’s some efficient work if you ask me.

So John formulates a plan but needs certain things like a fake passport and lots of cash.  He learns how to break into cars and make a skeleton key from YouTube.  You know, I never really thought about it but I guess you can learn how to do just about anything from YouTube.  Want to know how to do illegal shit?  Check YouTube, you’ll probably find what you’re looking for.  Actually, John should’ve just searched for a video on “how to break your wife out of prison” because there probably is one.  He would’ve saved the money that he spent on asking Neeson.

Anyway, in order to get more cash John tries to sell his house but plans get fucked up and he needs to break his wife out of jail a little earlier than expected.  He can’t close a deal on the house in time so he decides to rip off some drug dealers.  Actually he almost robs a bank first but wimps out at the last minute.  So naturally the next best thing is to go after some drug operation.  Now this might be the most fucked up part of the movie because he follows this one scumbag to his house, busts in and pulls a gun on everyone.  Then he starts to burn the house down because they won’t tell him where the cash is.  The main drug dealer (Kevin Corrigan (Pineapple Express, Superbad)) tells John that the house is a meth lab and it’s gonna blow up but that doesn’t stop him.  In fact he ends up shooting and killing the guy.  He also finds and steals the money.  But just to recap a bit, John’s wife is in jail for murder and even though there was no eye-witness report the evidence is stacked against her.  So we don’t know for sure if she actually bludgeoned someone to death.  But with John we do know for sure that he just shot someone and they died as a direct result.  This asshole also causes the deaths of several others in the drug house by setting it on fire.  Jesus man.  This guy is fucked in the head.

You want to know what the real kicker in this whole thing is though?  They actually succeed.  John, his wife and their son flee the country and go to Venezuela.  I really didn’t know if they were going to escape but at the same time I didn’t want to believe that the movie would have them fully go through with it, not only successfully escape from prison but also the country.

And aside from that totally ridiculous (and somewhat hilarious) ending, none of the characters are likeable.  It’s really a rare thing.  You can have characters that you don’t really care about.  That happens a lot.  But with this one it wasn’t that I didn’t care, it was that I wanted to see them fail.  John is such a stupid motherfucker that he thinks he can actually get away with breaking his wife out of jail and the two of them, along with their son, can live in some remote part of the world for the rest of their lives.  That’s so selfish and not fair to anyone else.  He doesn’t ask Lara if she’s up for this, he just goes ahead and does it.  There’s also a high probability that he won’t succeed and then their kid will have two parents that are either in jail or dead from trying to run from the cops.  This sonuvabitch deserves to be in jail for going through with such a dumb fucking idea.  I think the movie tries to make him seem like a smart man and a hero for doing something like this but he’s totally not.

I mean just to show how much of a jackass this guy is take this one scene where John meets a woman at the playground who invites John’s son to her daughter’s birthday party.  She says to that she would love to meet John’s wife and after some more conversation John admits that Lara’s in prison and then adds, “she’s innocent.  She didn’t kill that woman”.  To which the woman doesn’t quite know how to reply.  John didn’t need to tell her but he couldn’t help himself.  Just like he doesn’t need to do this jailbreak but, again he can’t help himself.  Just pick up the fucking pieces and move on guy.  You have a son to raise and a life to lead.  I know having an imprisoned wife sucks but going through with this scheme isn’t the answer.

With all of that said Lara may be more unlikeable than John though.  In the beginning we see John and Lara out on a double date and Lara starts fighting with the other couple over some stupid bullshit.  She also tells us that she doesn’t like her boss and fights with her as well.  So we’re given a portrait of an asshole character that doesn’t get along with anybody.  Then later when John’s visiting her in prison she gets fed up with his undying belief that she’s innocent and tells him that he’s wrong for thinking that.  So she admits for a second that she actually committed the murder.  Why is she being such a bitch towards this guy that is obviously completely devoted to her?  On one hand I thought it was cool that they made you think that she might have actually killed someone but at the same time if Lara really did it then she deserves to be in jail and shouldn’t be broken out of it.  And when John finally puts his plan into action Lara doesn’t really hesitate that much.  She’s just as much of an asshole for going along with him.  I mean I guess she’s in for life and it wouldn’t matter in the long run but still they’re gonna get people hurt and/or killed by trying to escape.  These characters just think about themselves.

On the positive side there are some pretty weird cameos in this thing like Daniel Stern (Home Alone, Rookie of the Year) as Lara’s lawyer, Brian Dennehy (First Blood, Tommy Boy) as John’s father, RZA (music shit, American Gangster) as a drug dealer and I already mentioned Liam Neeson and Kevin Corrigan.  During the film every once in a while I would ask myself, “did I really just see Daniel Stern and Russell Crowe do a scene together in a movie in 2011?” 
 

This piece was written and directed by Paul Haggis, the guy who wrote movies like the new Daniel Craig Bond pictures, the two back to back Clint Eastwood World War II films, Million Dollar Baby and In the Valley of Elah.  He also wrote and directed Crash (2004) which I absolutely did not like in the least.  But this movie is a remake of a French film from 2008 called Pour Elle (or in English: Anything for Her).  It stars Vincent Lindon from La moustache and Diane Kruger from Inglorious Bastards and National Treasure.  I haven’t seen it but from the trailer it looks like pretty much the same exact movie.  Although, I like the cast better in Anything for Her so purely based on that I’m calling the original the better version.

The Next Three Days was kind of entertaining in the same way that the monkey in Ed is supposed be kinda real but it’s totally just some dude in an ape suit.  I can’t say that I recommend this movie but at the same time the concept is so out there that I couldn’t stop watching.  I wanted to see how far this asshole was going to take this jailbreak idea and if he was going to succeed.  But I really hate these fucking kinds of movies that think they’re so cunning with their jailbreaks or bank robberies or getaways or whatever.  None of them ever make any sense because if they did then people would be getting away with this shit right and left.  By the way I have no idea what the title means.  It didn’t take three days for John to come up with his plan, Lara wasn’t in jail for only three days and it sure didn’t take three days for them to escape so I don’t get it.  Maybe they left out a part in the movie where they only lived three days after they made it to South America before they got gunned down by some Venezuelan gangsters or some shit.

You know what I think could have made this movie into a real good piece of art is if they showed Lara fighting for her life in prison.  That was a missed opportunity.  I think people (and by that I mean “I”) would have enjoyed the film more if most of the movie was about Lara getting addicted to drugs while in jail and having to fashion a shiv to defend herself against other inmates but then has to do some nasty shit like gouge someone’s eyes out in order to get more drugs.  And it would all happen in three days.  Yea that works a little better.