Home | Movies By Year | Movies from 2010
The Next Three Days
Buy The Next Three Days now from AmazonFirst, read the Wikipedia article. Then, scroll down to see what other TopShelfReviews readers thought about the movie. And once you've experienced the movie, tell everyone what you thought about it.
Wikipedia article
'The Next Three Days' is a 2010 American action thriller film written and directed by Paul Haggis and starring Russell Crowe and Elizabeth Banks. It was released in the United States on November 19, 2010, and was filmed on location in Pittsburgh. It is a remake of the 2008 French film 'Pour elle' ('Anything for Her') by Fred Cavay and Guillaume Lemans.
Plot
Lara Brennan is wrongly convicted of murdering her boss and is sentenced to life in prison. Her young son Luke ceases to acknowledge her during prison visits. Three years later, following the failure of her appeal, her husband John wants to take this case to the supreme court but his lawyer indicates he is out of legal options and tells John that there is no way that she is getting out. John gets a call from the hospital that Lara attempted suicide. He pleads with the hospital doctor and gets two minutes with her. They spend it seemingly in silence. John begins to research prison breaks and becomes obsessed with breaking her out of prison.
John consults Damon Pennington in New York City, a former inmate who escaped from prison seven times and wrote a book on escaping from prison. Pennington tells John that escaping from Pittsburgh is tough, because of all the bridges and bottlenecks. After 9/11, the city can be locked down in 15 minutes. He tells John that he will need enough cash to last himself and his family for several years, fake documents including (passports, drivers licenses and social security numbers that will pass through credit checks), and a country (which do not attract American tourists) to escape to as well. Pennington tells John to ask himself if he can "be that guy" who knocks over an old lady or shoots a cop if it is the difference between escape and a life in jail. Following Damon's advice, three months before the jail break, John begins to prepare. He studies escape routes and prison routines and buys a handgun.
Struggling to obtain fake IDs, he begins to buy OxyContin from drug dealers and asks one if he sells passports. He gets directions to a hotel bar where he gets mugged and robbed by the dealer and his friend. He sells his furniture and belongings, and gets ready to sell his house. Later, a man who is a biker and saw John at the bar the other night meets him at his house and said that he can get him the fake passports and identification for $3,700 which were exchanged a few days later and after the guy leaves on his motorcycle John spies on another man who is also a biker on his motorcycle outside his house. The next day, John is almost caught testing a bump key inside Lara's current jail. A police officer also sees him vomit outside and follows him home. John also learns how to break into a medical van and changes Laras health records.
When John learns that Lara will be transferred in three days to high security prison, he is forced to make an emergency plan. Unable to sell his house in time, he drops his son off at his father's house and considers robbing a bank but hesitates at the last minute and he almost runs over a mother and her child as he stresses. He meets his wife in jail and they begin to argue. In a fit of quiet rage, she admits she did it, but John does not believe her. Desperate at his wife's failing mental health, John tails a local drug dealer to a meth lab, sets fire to it and robs it of cash. After holding the dealer and the meth maker at gunpoint, and a firefight with the meth maker John kills him, and the dealer dies in Johns car as John tries to save him after being shot by his own boss. John breaks his taillight as he escapes and then leaves the dealer's dead body on the transit bench at the bus stop before driving off into the night.
As John goes to pick up his son at his fathers house, his father finds John's plane tickets. As he leaves, his father shakes his hand and gives him a final hug goodbye. The cops come to investigate the meth lab incident and find a broken taillight, which matches any 2004-2009 Toyota Prius.
Beginning his plan, John rents a different car and plants a falsified blood work in a medical van near a prison where Lara is imprisoned indicating Lara is in a state of hyperkalemia and leaves Luke at a birthday party. He also cuts the phone line to the Med center where the blood was tested. Lara is transferred from jail to a nearby university hospital. Following evidence left behind at the drug house police track down John's car, break into his empty house and conclude that he is planning to break his wife out. They rush to the hospital to capture him.
Lara's guards at the hospital are overcome by John, and he convinces her to escape with him. John and Lara exit the hospital, narrowly evade police and leave the area disguised as Pittsburgh Penguins fans heading to the train station. They board a train on track 4 and suddenly John pulls the emergency brake to evade police. John leads her to a getaway car that he had stashed and they get away over the bridge in under 15 minutes. He checks and sees that he now has 35 minutes to get away.
They discover Luke is unexpectedly at the zoo for the birthday party and drive there to retrieve him while police set up roadblocks around the city. John realizes that he has run out of time and turns for the highway instead, saying that he will later find a way to get their son to them. Lara's response is to open the car door, ready to fall out onto the road and end their problems. John grabs her as the car spins around on the highway and a truck nearly collides with the car, and John takes the risk to go to the zoo to get their child. After, they pass through the checkpoint by picking up an elderly couple for cover at the train station. They drop off the couple at Buffalo and drive to a Canadian airport. Police are misled by escape plan fragments John has purposely left behind and delay the wrong flight.
As they pass though passport control, the officer lets them through, as their picture is not yet on the wanted list. As a shift change occurs, the wanted list is updated and the new guard is unaware that the previous guard had allowed them through. John, Lara and Luke board a plane bound for Caracas, Venezuela, which has no extradition treaty with the United States. Detectives return to the crime scene where Lara's boss was killed. A flashback shows details of the murder and Lara's innocence. Remembering that Lara claimed to have lost a button at the time of the murder, a detective searches a nearby storm drain but just misses the button that could have substantiated her alibi. John, Lara and Luke are next seen at a hotel in Caracas. As Lara lies down next to her son, Luke kisses his mother and they fall asleep together. As the film ends, John takes a picture of his sleeping wife and son.
Cast
* Russell Crowe as John Brennan
* Elizabeth Banks as Lara Brennan
* Brian Dennehy as George Brennan
* Lennie James as Lieutenant Nabulsi
* Olivia Wilde as Nicole
* Ty Simpkins as Luke Brennan
* Helen Carey as Grace Brennan
* Liam Neeson as Damon Pennington
* Daniel Stern as Meyer Fisk
* Kevin Corrigan as Alex Gaidar
* Jason Beghe as Detective Quinnan
* Aisha Hinds as Detective Collero
* Tyrone Giordano as Mike
* Jonathan Tucker as David
* Allan Steele as Sergeant Harris
* RZA as Mouss
* James Ransone as Harv
* Moran Atias as Erit
* Michael Buie as Mick Brennan
* Trudie Styler as Dr. Byrdie Lifson
* Tyler M Green and Toby J. Green as 3-year-old Luke
* Kaitlyn Wylde as Julie
Development
Paul Haggis was developing a film about Martin Luther King but could not get the financing. He began looking for less expensive projects and came across the French film 'Pour Elle' ('Anything for Her') by Fred Cavay.
The plot of 'Pour Elle' involves a teacher, Julien (Vincent Lindon), who experiences difficulties when his wife (Diane Kruger) becomes a suspect in a murder investigation and is arrested; Julien does not believe that his wife is guilty of the crime, and attempts to remove her from the prison. 'Pour Elle' was Cavay's directing debut. The film was one of the main attractions of the Alliance Franaise French Film Festival in 2010. Cavay explained the plot and motivation for making the film, "We wanted to make a real human story about an ordinary man doing an extraordinary thing because he's faced with a miscarriage of justice. The film also talks about couragesaying how you show courage depending on the situation. In France, for example, there were good people who did not go into the Resistance against the Germans."
Haggis later recalled, "I'd always wanted to do a little thriller. I'd always loved films like 'Three Days of the Condor', those romantic thrillers ... It's a lovely, slight, 90-minute film, the French film."[http://www.scriptmag.com/features/interview-paul-haggis-last-three-days "FROM SCRIPT TO SCREEN: Paul Haggis On The Next Three Days" By: David S. Cohen 'Script Magazine' 2010]
Changes from French film
Haggis made a number of key changes from the French film:They made it quite clear from the beginning of the film, she was innocent, and that he was loving, and he'd do anything to get her out, and, in the end, they lived happily ever after. The bumps along the way were good but I thought I could make him pay a larger price. So, the first thing I did was ask myself what the question was. I need to have a question if I'm starting a movie. The question I came up with, and I'm not sure if it's reflected in the film or not, but it's what I was writing toward, was: Would you save the woman you loved if you knew that by doing so you'd become someone she'd no longer love? That interested me. And that wasn't in the French film at all. The whole issue of innocence was fascinating to me because I didn't necessarily want to say whether she was guilty or innocent. I just wanted John to be the only one who believes she's innocent. The evidence is overwhelming. Even his parents think she's probably guilty. Even their own lawyer. Yet he still believed ... and what that level of belief does for someone, how infectious it is. So, those are two things I was playing with.
Cavay told 'The Age' regarding the remake of the film by Haggis, he is eager "to be a spectator of my own film". The director commented on the news his film would be remade by Haggis, "It's a strange feeling. I wrote this story in my very small apartment in Paris. When I saw my name next to Russell Crowe on the net, it was amazing."
Haggis based the lead character on himself:
I just sat down and said, "If I had to break the woman I love out of prison, how would I do it?" I'd go on the Internet, that's the first thing I do. I'd Google "How to break out of prison." So, that's exactly what I did. I went on and Googled "How to break out of prison," "How to break into a car," and found these fascinating things, and I just used them. I figured that's what he would do. I also knew I would fail spectacularly, at least at first. But then I would continue. And I'd get the shit beat out of me, and I would trust the wrong people, and I would do the wrong things. I'd start to feel really good about myself, that I'd figured the whole thing out, and then something would go wrong. I would just keep going until I either was caught or we got out or something happened. That's what he does. So, I just tried to make him an everyman. I loved the fact that this guy was also an English teacher, so he was a romantic. He was talking about Don Quixote. He's got this whole romanticized vision of how you sacrifice yourself for a woman, how you go about something like this. It's terribly romanticized and so completely impractical.Haggis also based John's research of prison break-out techniques on his own Internet research on the Church of Scientology after its San Diego chapter endorsed 2008 California Proposition 8, which revealed the faith's controversies to him and led to him leaving the church.Wright, Lawrence (2013). Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 303.
Filming
In October 2009, Haggis and his staff were in the principal photography stage of production filming in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. On October 4, 2009, filming of the movie was ongoing and was set to complete on December 12, 2009.On December 14, the 'Pittsburgh Post-Gazette' reported that filming of 'The Next Three Days' was going to wrap that day, after 52 days of shooting..
Release
In October 2009, the film was originally scheduled to be released in 2011, by March 2010, the Australian media company Village Roadshow was set to release the film in Australia in November 2010. It was released in the United States on November 19, 2010.
Reception
Critical response
was nominated for an Irish Film and Television Award for Best International Actor for his role as John Brennan.On Rotten Tomatoes, 50% of 169 critics gave the film a positive review, with an average rating of 5.8/10. The website's critical consensus reads: "Russell Crowe and Elizabeth Banks give it their all, but their solid performances aren't quite enough to compensate for 'The Next Three Days' uneven pace and implausible plot." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 52 out of 100, based on 36 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film a grade "B+" on an A+ to F scale.
In her positive review, Lisa Schwarzbaum of 'Entertainment Weekly' wrote, "The movie's real strength ... is generating escalating waves of plot tension and misdirection as John, heeding advice, makes his jail-busting moves."Schwarzbaum, Lisa. [https://ew.com/article/2010/11/23/next-three-days-2/ "The Next Three Days,"] 'Entertainment Weekly' (November 23, 2010). In contrast, Roger Ebert awarded the film two and a half out of four stars and said, "'The Next Three Days' is not a bad movie; it's just somewhat of a waste of the talent involved."
Box office
The film opened at #5 with a weekend gross of $6.5 million from 2,564 theaters, an average of $2,552 per theater. It closed on January 6, 2011, having earned $21.1 million domestically and $46.3 million overseas, for a worldwide total gross of $67.4 million, against its $30 million budget.References
Buy The Next Three Days now from Amazon
<-- Return to movies from 2010