Fridae

Paul Haggis, the unfortunately named (check out what Haggis is in Scotland) new darling of serious Oscar cinema after Crash and Million Dollar Baby, directs for another time what he wants to be a muscular thriller but turns out to be little more than a slightly smarter version of his James Bond scripts: a mature but hamhanded thriller that tries to use the form of a thriller to plunge into deeper themes, and fails.

The story takes the form of a standard jailbreak movie, done with a difference; that its perpetrators are socially responsible and liberal upper middle-class folk rather than those that engage in any sort of criminal activity. John Brennan (Russell Crowe) is an English teacher at Community College. His wife Lara (Elizabeth Banks) is a businesswoman of sorts. They have a fairly happy and steady life with a son together. Lara is accused of murder and the evidence is too compelling to dismiss. With no one taking his case, John Brennan suddenly finds his once happy life thrown out of whack. His son is about to grow up motherless, and his wife, who he knows did not commit the murder, is going to be in prison for life. What is he to do?

Spring her from the slammer of course. Not easy when it’s Allegheny County Jail in Pittsburgh, PA, which is basically an island city. The bulk of the action actually takes place not over three days, but three years, as Crowe begins to explore all the means that he can to spring his wife from prison and plan their escape to somewhere they can perhaps live happily ever after... or so it seems.

Alas, rather than thrilling and fast-paced, the proceedings of the first hour or so, in which Crowe immaculately plans his getaway, gaining a major setback for every minor success, is a detailed but leadfooted process, in which the film ignores for long passages the possibility that Lara might be guilty of the murders, and we watch frustrated and John refuses to even consider that possibility despite being one who seems like quite an intelligent man. The film’s script attempts to make him a kind of Quixotic figure, as shown by his lectures at college in which he discusses if it is better to live in a world and follow a seemingly unrealistic goal of one’s own rather than face what is deemed to be “reality”. Except it fails to consider that Quixotic figures really attempt to uphold a complete value system, and not just for personal reasons. John Brennan is far from Quixotic, and an actor less macho and intense than Crowe might have been able to bring that out, but here Crowe seems miscast, perhaps for monetary reasons. The film’s tagline “lose what you are to save what you love”, hardly seems possible with Crowe, who reeks of such masculinity it’s hard to imagine him as a regular, or even physically weak, intellectual, even one who eventually becomes an action hero.

Such grouses nevertheless hide the film’s true, albeit flawed concept. The above is a real distraction from what the film is really about, and underneath the standard thriller formula and moments lies a film of real depth if one discerns, but its execution is so leaden and heavy-handed that it’s a hard film to like even if it strives, and eventually does succeed, in getting its message across.

An important clue to what the The Next Three Days is really about can be discerned from how the title itself never appears on the screen, not till the very end. Where are these proverbial next three days in the course of the movie itself anyway? Why is it called The Next Three Days if it takes place over a time frame exceeding three years?