The central question of “The Next Three Days,” based on the French film “Pour Elle” (“Anything for Her”), is whether or not John Brennan can become the criminal he needs to be in order to break his wife out of jail. An intriguing question about the human psyche, if only it did not take three-fourths of the movie to set up and I bought the answer a little more.
Brennan, played by Oscar winner Russell Crowe, is your average community college professor until his wife, played by Elizabeth Banks, is incarcerated for allegedly killing her boss. After three years of raising his son alone, the idea of his wife remaining behind the cinder blocks of a Pittsburgh jail proves too much and he begins plotting her escape.
While “Die Hard” had John McClane, a New York City cop with few qualms about firing a gun to free his hostage wife, Brennan is armed with an iPhone, a Prius and probably a few too many nights watching spy movies. In fact, by the time he finally gets near a gun, he has to ask the salesman where the bullets go. Funny, but as this interaction takes place nearly an hour into the film, I was not amused.
Also, the hypothetical spy movies might have been a mistake, as Brennan proceeds to skulk around the prison premises on one of the least subtle reconnaissance stints ever. If the husband of an inmate takes a helicopter tour of the city and focuses his camera on aerial views of the prison, you have to wonder if it’s for something other than his Christmas card.
This is just the beginning of Brennan’s plotting as he spends the next three months diagraming their escape on his bedroom wall. While the months, at least an hour of the movie, slug along, there are a few tense moments between Brennan and local drug dealers. Other less exciting moments include Brennan learning Photoshop, watching “how to be a criminal” videos on YouTube and learning all the ways that the iPhone can fool people into thinking they are spies. It is fair to say that it got a little slow and I had to wonder if I was watching an Apple commercial.
There’s a lot of time spent watching Russell Crowe plan, which is a shame when the likes of Liam Neeson and Elizabeth Banks are allotted so little screen time. The jokes about a wannabe criminal driving a Prius are easy, but they would probably be funnier if by the end of the movie he transformed into the driver of an Aston Martin. Spoiler alert: he drives a family-friendly Chevy Traverse in the climatic final scenes.
And maybe that’s my real problem with this movie. Brennan starts out as a man who teaches Don Quixote and has just bought his first pair of reading glasses. After an hour and a half of shady characters warning him about the dark person he will have to become and the dirty deeds he will have to perform to be successful, he never has that moment where he’s forced to transform. He gets the job done, but in the end the conclusion is less about what he had to change about himself and more about luck and whether or not he can outsmart the Pittsburgh police department.
In the end, “The Next Three Days” is a cheap thrill at the expense of a long, boring first hour and a half.
E-mail Suchland at ssuchland@media.ucla.edu.