Review of The Next Three Days (2010) by Shiira — 04 Dec 2010

Did she do it? Did Laura Brennan(Elizabeth Banks), wife and mother, bludgeon her boss to death with a fire extinguisher? This woman's innocence or guilt is the meat of "The Next Three Days", a thriller that's so preoccupied with her husband's walk on the unseemly side of life, Laura's innocence or guilt becomes beside the point, when compared to showing at what lengths an erudite husband, a college English professor, would go to prove his love.

Since Russell Crowe cuts a rather physically imposing figure, the filmmaker doesn't have at his disposal, the option of exploiting the absurdity inherent in an intellectual being forced to remake himself as an action hero.

One day, John Brennan is teaching "Don Quixote" to a roomful of eager freshman, and before you know it, he's burning down a crystal meth lab and shooting men in cold blood. Although this isn't the first time Crowe finds himself playing an egghead(he was, of course, John Forbes Nash in "A Beautiful Mind"), the Aussie actor's thick-set body, angry scowl, and reputation as a brawler(all three factors even more pronounced than it was back in 2001), would make him ill-suited to play the game theory genius had the Ron Howard film been shot today, let alone, a professor at a community college.

Crowe is badly miscast; he's neither vulnerable enough(like a Billy Bob Thornton), nor downright prissy enough(like a Patrick Wilson) to walk into a gun store, and ask for a clerk's assistance in locating the spot where the bullets go.

The first chance John gets to discharge his firearm(the shakedown of the aforementioned ice house), he looks competent, like a seasoned cop, or criminal. He's a good shot. Not for one second does the moviegoer fear for his safety.

Aaron Eckhart(who played an English professor in Neal LaBute's "Possession") would remember to look scared. Worst of all, the academic mindset to ask questions is what's missing from this husky brainiac.

Rather than bust Laura out of jail, why doesn't John harness all that brain power toward proving his wife's innocence? Because of the professor's reluctance to inquire about the day in question, he never learns about the button that Laura lost after she collided with the real murderer? Most educators, at the very least, would return to the scene of the crime and attempt to reconstruct the sequence of events leading up to the murder, then canvass the immediate vicinity in search of witnesses who might've crossed paths with the sociopathic bag lady.

By not doing so, there's the implication that John presumes his wife is guilty, in which plotting her jailbreak becomes, by default, the only option available to this desperate husband. "The Next Three Days", however, is as thick-headed as its hero.

John never wavers from his belief in Laura's innocence, but the film fails to realize that somebody from the academic arena might have conceivably played amateur sleuth at the outset(since there's some overlap between detective work and scholastic work), and only after failing to turn up any evidence, as a last resort, would an English professor play the vigilante card.