The next three days - 2010

Not bad: I’d say 35% drama, 35% of planning, 15% action, 15% nonsense. The thing I liked most is how slow he is. Not the movie, but the character; it takes him weeks to do it all, until the last part of the movie when he has, no surprise, three days and in “the next three days” he has to do it.

We meet John and Lara Brennan (Russell Crowe and Elizabeth Banks) only for one night before hell breaks loose. That night she says she had a fight with her boss, and we see that she’s not exactly an easy-going person. They have sex in the car after dinner at a restaurant (come on, they’re not teens anymore :-/ ) then they go home. Next thing they know she gets arrested for murder. Her boss has been killed after the two of them had a fight, Lara’s prints are on a fire extinguisher found at the scene, neatly against a wall (Columbo would have had people go mad trying to explain that) plus a man came into the parking lot, saw her drive away and then saw the body on the floor. 

Three years of following legal procedure bring them to Lara being convicted. Nobody believes in her innocence, only John. There’s nothing else to do now so John starts planning a way to help her escape. 

He looks on the internet and finds a man who escaped from prison and can give him precious advice (Liam Neeson) then he starts his serious planning. He needs false documents of course, but the first man he asks steals his money and gives him nothing. So he starts surveilling those guys, studying the situation, then he goes to the bad guy’s home to steal back his money.

Now he has a lot. One guy heard him talking about needing false documents and goes to his house to make the deal. This time it works, the guy takes the money and gives him the papers.

All this time he has said nothing to Lara, she has no idea what he’s planning to do. 

Lara is more and more bad-tempered with him, which is understandable in a way, she’s stressed out by this situation, but of course it’s also because the viewer may doubt her. I mean, watching the movie I only had his belief in her innocence, but no actual proof that she didn’t do it. I never believed it for a second, but it could have been, because for him it wouldn’t have made such a big difference, he wanted to have her back, he never considered she might be guilty. 

When she attempts suicide, he decides he has to act quickly. He makes himself a universal-key watching youtube videos and tries it to open the jail elevator, ma that was too easy and they were prepared for such a thing, so it didn’t work. It worked at home but not there, and the key breaks in the lock and he has to leave it there. He’s questioned about it but he denies knowing anything about it and they let him go (I suppose they can’t ask him for his fingerprints..).

He has to come up with something different to get her out of there. He breaks into the medical supplies van and he changes the medical papers of his wife. She’s checked regularly because she’s diabetic (or do they do it with everyone? Don’t know), and she gets transferred into a hospital. John shows up there with a gun, he stops the guards and takes her away, losing a lot of time because she didn’t want to, and they run away. 

dfs

They go to pick up their son but he went to the zoo with his friends. They don’t really have time to go there because the roads will be blocked in no time by the police, but she absolutely refuses to go away without her son, she’s like crazy and she opens her car dor while running, she kind of throws her head out, he takes hold of her, and they’re rather close to getting killed. They stop to breath then they go back to the zoo to find their son. Now they are together and he goes to the train station knowing very well that all trains have been cancelled (or delayed) because of him, so he offers to drive an elderly couple home (well, not old old, but older than them). The police are looking for a couple with a child, so when they see the car full of people they don’t stop them. 

Next stop is the airport, where they use their faked passports to take a flight to Venezuela. Nobody knows where they went, that is nobody else but his father; it was a good scene when he found out, and of course the man will keep the secret. 

The success of the plan depends too much on luck for my taste. At the airport there’s a change of guards and the new one sees the pictures just in but has not seen them, and at the roadblock they didn’t have their pictures either, things like that. One more thing, he must have thought of everything in the last few days, after he took the bad guys money , because he bought a new car for the escape. 

Anyway, the movie was well made, nice to watch and all that, but I did not like Lara, and I wasn’t crazy about the escape plan either. 

Conclusion, I don’t think I’ll watch it again, no.

P.s. For the viewer piece of mind, at the end of the movie we are shown clearly that Lara was innocent and had nothing to do with it…