The Next Three Days (2010) Paul Haggis

There's a tradition in my family, every Sunday (as long as it's not the classical music concert season) we go to the theaters and watch a film, almost always picked by my father, which turns out to be a really bad movie.  Today it was, as always, a failed movie.

The Next Three Days seems to be two movies in one.  The first half is unbearable.  The rhythm is completely off, the acting is awful, the drama feels forced, and you can't keep yourself from asking "weren't we supposed to be watching an action film?"  Well, there's no action at all in the first half of the film, there's only a story that doesn't quite seem to have a reason for being told. 

The truth is all you've got is a lady, played by Elizabeth Banks, that allegedly murdered her boss, and even though her husband, Russel Crowe, believes she's innocent, all the evidence shows that she's guilty.  So, you as an audience, can't help but thinking that she deserves to be in jail, and since you don't empathize at all with her, (due to the first and only scenes you get to see her living a normal life) you're kind of glad she is in jail. 

And then there's Russel Crowe's obsession with rescuing her wife and going back to the way things were, but since he has a lovely kid and a great looking woman, played by Olivia Wilde, is totally hitting on him, you can't help but thinking "why all the effort for getting this crazy lady out of jail?  Why not just move on and try to be happy with what life's offering you?"  But no, this guy's truly obsessed. 

So, then you start to get the feeling that Elizabeth Bank's character doesn't want to be rescued at all.  And then you're thinking there's some potential there, right?  You got a guy who wants to rescue a girl who doesn't want to be rescued.  Don't we all relate to this in a way?  Haven't we all needed so badly to believe in something that we completely forgot to think if it was worth believing in it or not?  Now, there's a great story, but for telling that story you need great acting, mind-blowing dialogues, credible situations, and great character's chemistry (to mention a few) and those are things this movie is lacking, because it wasn't supposed to be this kind of movie, it was only meant to be an action film.

The second half, you get the action you were waiting for, but at this point you're already so bored by trying to decipher what's the whole point of the first half of the movie, that you have stopped caring that the movie is going to end up the way you always knew it would.  So when it finally ends that way, heroic, corny, predictable, and filled with all sort of Hollywood's unlikely-to-happen-even-if-the-whole-police-and-criminals-were-completely-daft kind of scenes, you're just glad it ended.