CINEMA: The Next Three Days

Hollywood has a habit of remaking foreign movies and somehow missing the point — detracting from what made the original worthy of a remake in the first place. The Next Three Days, a reworking of French movie Pour Elle, is a case in point.

It’s not that there’s anything inherently wrong with the movie it’s just that it lacks bite and that special je ne sais quoi that would make it jump off the screen and grab you. Russell Crowe stars as John Brennan, an ordinary man who finds himself capable of extraordinary acts when his wife (Elizabeth Banks) is imprisoned for murder. Left to raise their young son alone, and convinced of his wife’s innocence, Brennan finds himself contemplating a whole series of illegal acts, including murder, as he tries to figure out how he could stage a prison break and flee the country with his family.

Crowe carries much of the movie and does so well being solid and dependable, however Banks disappears from screen for long periods of the film and remains something of a cipher, this weakens the narrative as we are less sympathetic to her than we should be. Director Paul Haggis handles Brennan’s methodical background research of how he is going to pull this off (escape routes, escape timings, flight tickets, luggage) with remarkable attention to detail and it is this section of the film that proves to be more engaging than the actual prison break and subsequent chase. It’s a given in this genre of film that things don’t all run to plan but the glitch here, involving the son, leads to an action sequence that really doesn’t convince and just how the family will start a new life (and pay for it) once they have fled is poorly thought through.

This is disappointing from Haggis who made such an impression with Crash and one wonders if a return to shooting his own screenplays (he won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Crash and also wrote Million Dollar baby and Flags Of Our Fathers) based on original material would suit his directing style better.