Next Three Days, The : Movie Review



“What if we choose to exist solely in a reality of our own making?” asks Pittsburgh community-college lit professor John Brennan (Russell Crowe) rhetorically during a discussion of Don Quixote in The Next Three Days, Paul Haggis’s fourth effort as director. Like his lumpy protagonist, Haggis, who also scripted this remake of the 2008 French thriller Pour Elle (never released stateside), too confidently assumes viewers are as quick to abandon sense and logic.

The film’s ordeal begins one morning three years ago at the breakfast table of the loving Brennan household, which includes short-fused wife Lara (Elizabeth Banks) and three-year-old son. Domestic bliss is interrupted by the cops barging in to arrest Lara for murder, right at the moment she’s trying to wash a bloodstain out of her trench coat—and the day after she had a horrible fight with her now-dead boss.


See www.villagevoice.com for full review