Paul Haggis | 133 mins | Blu-ray | 2.35:1 | USA & France / English | 12 / PG-13
If someone you loved was locked up for decades for a crime you were sure they didn’t commit, how far would you go to get them out? That’s the premise of this methodical thriller from writer-director Paul Haggis (of Crash, of course), based on the French film Pour Elle.
Those with even a very basic grasp of French (like me) may spot that translates literally as “For Her” (though the English releases call it Anything for Her), which is why Russell Crowe does what he does: his middle-class idyll is shattered one day when police storm into his house and violently arrest his wife (Elizabeth Banks), in front of their small child, for the murder of the boss she argued with the night before. (This, incidentally, is the least plausible part of the entire movie — there’s no need for the police to storm the house like that, and in real life they wouldn’t. Well, American police might, I suppose. But I still don’t believe it.) The evidence is stacked against her, and her explanations for it sound a little far-fetched. She’s convicted, sent down… and when all legal means of appeal are exhausted, Crowe sets about planning a prison break.
This setup is, in my opinion, a really good one — though I feel kind of biased as the basics have crossed my mind as a good basis for a plot long before this or Pour Elle existed. Thing is, it’s inherently quite a daft concept: prisons are (rightfully) incredibly secure places — no ordinary Joe is breaking anyone out of there in a couple of weeks. By rights, a film of this ilk should probably be a Taken-esque slightly-OTT action-thriller, 
with a protagonist who either already has a “particular set of skills” or implausibly learns them (maybe over a longer period of time) before putting in motion their crazy scheme.
Haggis’ film is a mix of that, in its final act, and an attempt at depicting a serious, plausible, realistic version of what might happen if a regular, intelligent guy set his mind to such a task. Except it’s not really plausible that he’d get very far. Nonetheless, the film takes its time going through the motions of how Crowe might learn and practice the skills required, fund the enterprise, formulate his plan… Some have described this as dull, but I think it actually works. It’s a different kind of film to a pacey prison-break actioner, but if you were crazy enough to try this in the real world, of course you’d start by looking up “how to” articles online, by finding the authors of “how I escaped” books, by trying to buy a gun on the black market and messing it up, and so on.
According to Haggis, the French film is actually quite American-styled, a fast-paced thriller, which he chose to expand out. I’ve not seen the original so can’t say how he’s done that, but the implication is that the detail of the planning, and of the characters’ regular lives, has received more attention. A subplot with Olivia Wilde is a pointless aside that only explains itself once it throws a spanner in the works during the climax, but the scenes with Crowe’s parents pay off thanks to an excellent near-wordless supporting turn from Brian Dennehy. Best thing in the film, easily.
Running him a close second is the all-action final half hour or so, when Crowe (spoilers! but not really!) finally stages the actual escape. It’s a long time coming, but we’re paid off with a pretty fantastic long-form action sequence. There’s genuine tension about whether they’ll pull it off or not, and along the way we’re treated to a few nice flourishes in his plan. There’s a fair degree of silliness still, though, so at least that’s in-keeping with the rest of the movie.
Thing is, for all my love for the idea, it’s ultimately quite a silly concept. As much as we might dream of rescuing our innocent loved one from a life of torment behind bars, if it came to pass in reality, the vast majority of people would immediately realise it was an impossible dream. By trying to treat it plausibly, The Next Three Days is on a hiding to nothing — for all the realism of how Crowe begins his research and planning, there’s the downside that this slow-paced plausibility turns some viewers off; and when we do get the eventual escape, it’s an “in movie’s only” adrenaline-provoker that said viewers wanted all along. The film pretty much can’t win.
Finally, there’s an attempt to keep uncertain the truth about Banks’ culpability. Haggis never wanted that question to be answered — Crowe believes she’s innocent, even when she confesses to his face, and that’s what matters. I don’t think Haggis is a filmmaker who can resist answers, however, and for all his assertions that her innocence/guilt is left ambiguous, by the end I think you can be pretty darned certain which it is… which kinda makes all the previous attempts to leave it open feel hollow, especially the ones that side with the untrue.
The Next Three Days ends up as a solid thriller, with a methodical pace that will kill some viewers’ interest, but which conversely provides a depiction of detail that will hold the attention of anyone who’s ever pondered what they’d do in such a situation. The finale is largely worth the wait, at least, even if everyone will wish Haggis had skipped over a few longueurs while getting there.
The Next Three Days is on Channel 5 tonight at 10pm.
Ambiguous endings used to be anathema to film audiences. They wanted things tied up in a pretty little bow, thank you very much; all the conflicts resolved and all their questions answered. Then the likes of 
In the Blu-ray’s special features, Boyle comments that “it’s more classical than you might expect.” He’s talking specifically about the cinematography (and he’s right, but more on that later), but he could equally be talking about the entire movie. Though it has a storyline that blurs the line between what’s actually happening and what’s happening inside a character’s head (or is that characters’ heads?), the overall tone and style — particularly of the climax — is actually quite Hollywood. It’s Hollywood jazzed up with storytelling trickery, a quirky score, dashes of extreme gore and surprising nudity (that it’s not an 18 is somewhat surprising); but underneath all that it’s not a million miles away from your run-of-the-mill thriller.
there’s no switching to black and white for dreams, for instance; nothing to definitively tell you which state you’re in. And this is a good thing, because when you need to know you can tell, and the rest of the time… well, the film’s playing with you. That’s the point. What is real and what is a scenario McAvoy’s being talked through? Are these memories what happened or the product of an addled mind?
Dod Mantle’s cinematography is also strikingly handsome. As noted, the film’s buzz had me expecting something akin to late-career Tony Scott, all jumpy and weirdly saturated and fragmented. Instead, as Boyle said, it’s actually very classical, but with a great eye. There are a number of shots which would look fabulous framed and hung on the wall, not least of the street outside Dawson’s flat at night, a restaurant next to intersecting train lines, and aerial photography of red-lit nighttime motorway junctions, looking like some kind of Rorschach test-esque psychiatrist’s tool.
So much more than one famous scene, On the Waterfront is a movie about a magic jacket, which causes anyone who owns it to stand up for what’s morally right even in the face of oppression, but also to suffer badly when they do.
The only potential downside to this comes if you dig behind the scenes. Kazan was one of those who testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities during its 1940s and ’50s witchhunt for Communists in Hollywood, naming eight men who were later blacklisted. If you consider the film to be Kazan’s answer to critics of his actions (as it “widely” is, according to Wikipedia), then presumably Brando is meant to be Kazan, calling out those who are doing ill to good hardworking Americans. But many a great film has been made with poor motive — just because Kazan thinks what Brando’s character does and what he did are the same thing doesn’t mean we have to. Even then, the issue of Kazan’s testimony is not so straightforward: a former Communist himself, he faced the end of his career if he didn’t testify, and the names he gave up were already known to the committee. The controversy dogged him for the rest of his career, though: when he received an honorary Oscar in 1999, several notable audience members refused to applaud.
While subtext is undoubtedly a meaningful thing, and using one situation to comment on another is a tried and true way of presenting an argument or criticism, I’m not a proponent of offhandedly dismissing work(s) just because we don’t agree with the actions or beliefs of the person who made it. On the Waterfront is a powerful film, exemplarily made by skilled craftsmen. Whatever Kazan was trying to atone for with its message about standing up to bullies in defence of what’s right, the sentiment is true. And you don’t need a magic coat to do it either.
Like a 
The plot is essentially “
with both this and last year’s sequel proving huge hits, and a 
Based on a novel by Morton Freedgood (writing as John Godey), previously adapted into 
None of that here, where the captives are either even more unnoticeable, or heroic off-duty military types. So far so standard.
Applied here to such a meat-and-potatoes tale, it feels like they’re trying to jazz it up because it can’t sustain itself otherwise.
I confess, I’ve never really got on with the Coen brothers. I liked 
I don’t wholly agree, though I didn’t unabashedly love the film as some do. It’s perhaps a bit “of its time” now, and getting a little “you had to be there”; coming to it almost two decades later, it exemplifies a ’90s American mainstream/independent-borderline filmmaking sensibility; the kind of bracket the early works of Tarantino might also fall into, for instance.
If one did want to look into Lebowski more deeply, the most interesting facet is that noir one. It’s quite lightly of that genre — very much an updating and re-appropriation of certain tropes, rather than a straight-up example of where the modern version(s) of the genre is (are… or were). It feels like the Coens were consciously putting a present-day(-then) character through the paces of a traditional noir plot. Whether that was the deliberate structural conceit or just a side effect of making a noir pastiche, I couldn’t say.
After leaving his New York base to investigate some 
Stand-out sequences include a bit where the police detectives move through a crowd of suspects, all relaxing near the pool on a location shoot, while outlining each one’s possible motivations, essentially to their face. It’s a simple sequence, not exactly high on drama or humour, but there’s a pleasant structural touch to it. Or the finale: the Falcon is, as ever, drawn into the case by a mysterious woman… but by the end he has four of them grouped around him!
“In our peaceful country, life is very seldom in danger,” states one character halfway through The Falcon in Mexico, just one of many instances that might make you think the film was co-funded by the Mexican tourist board. Oh sure, there’s the usual array of thefts and murders that you’d expect from a Falcon adventure, but they’re mostly committed by Americans. No, the film on the whole is very keen on the place, and the quality of its police, and even ends with a shot of a poster proclaiming “Visit Mexico!”
What I did make out was grandly far-fetched — more so than normal, I mean. Considering the tone and style of the series, it’s kind of OK that most of the plot’s explanations are not even close to plausible in the real world. On the bright side, it does make for another genuine mystery (I should stop praising the series for this now, all the films do it).
With each passing entry, the Falcon films become less reminiscent of their Saint forebears and more akin to the Poirots and Marples of this world: a gently comical murder mystery, with a finite location and a finite number of suspects, where the ‘game’ of solving the plot is the point.
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