The Next Three Days review

Paul Haggis' "The Next Three Days" is a competent thriller that ought to be more. It comes down to a story that can go in a lot of interesting and different directions; takes some neat ones, but overall feels less surprising then it could be and feels just a bit too stale. Not that there aren't aspects that work, but they could be much better. Screenwriter and director Paul Haggis ("Crash") is actually the main issue here. Not so much his writing as much as his very regular directing. Throughout the vast majority of the film I caught myself thinking what if Michael Mann, Ridley Scott, Paul Greengrass or a number of other, more visually arresting filmmakers had put their eye behind the camera for this. What a thriller this would have been.

Before we jump on that though here's the skinny. Russell Crowe plays a college professor whose wife (Elizabeth Banks) gets arrested for the murder of her boss. We speed up three years as she's attempting more appeals and trying to stay connected with their son while in prison. In their visits the child doesn't respond to her in almost any fashion. Her husband though can't stand any of it. It isn't so much as he feels she's innocent of the crime, but he loves her so much that he cannot take seeing her jailed for possibly the rest of her life. And after the legal system seems to be swinging out of his favor he decides to take on a daring prison break in, rescue and escape. The vast majority of the film is the prep work he does. It's extensive and with some brief words from a master escapist (Liam Neeson in a nice cameo) sets his plan in motion. Though slow this probably one of the more interesting parts of the film. He's sloppy and learning his tricks of breaking into cars or creating bump keys via the internet and doesn't really have the stomach for violence or for making the hard decisions.

Another aspect that works well is Crowe and Banks' chemistry. From the darkly humorous opening it all works well with their back and fourths. They both seem human and quite down to Earth characters. The real problem is simply Haggis' dull directing and lack of style. The idea of "The Next Three Days" can go in so many directions and include so many close calls and tense sequences of suspense or out and out action. Haggis aims more for the suspense, but it rarely hits the mark and is never memorable. I thought back to Michael Mann's "Collateral". It's character rich and includes some decent action and suspense sequences on just a story level. What Mann did was paint us not just full pictures of the characters, but of L.A. from the top down. The world surrounding this one taxi in the city. It made the night and the locations characters and that helps create a real mood. "The Next Three Days" has no mood.

Furthermore Haggis works best in the slower bits of the film in general. Conversation pieces work fine, lead ups to slightly important moments work ok as well, but the bigger sequences or intense stuff is flat. It put me in a similar mind frame of "Derailed" and "Taken" except I liked both of those enough to recommend them, however slight it might be. Haggis is a strong and impressive writer and perhaps his directing will get better or he'll pick a story that might require more of a straight dramatic approach. Either way the film left me disappointed in all it could have done.