The Next Three Days fancies itself a heist flick, but it's really just a spruced up episode of Prison Break. Russell Crowe is buttoned up community college professor, John Brennan. This isn't muscled up Gladiator
Russell Crowe. This is back to the puddin' belly A Good Year 
Russell Crowe. He's married to a gorgeous, but hotheaded wife Lara, played by Elizabeth Banks. They have a young son, a seemingly idyllic life in Pittsburgh. Then everything they have goes up in smoke. It starts with a heated argument over female to female relations in the workplace, but ends with the cops busting down the Brennan's door and arresting Lara for the murder of her boss.At this point the movie basically gives everything away with a flashback runthrough of the crime, basically ensuring us that nothing will be as it seems. Beautiful. John, obsessed with getting his wife out of prison and out of legal options, decides that a jailbreak is in order.How does one go about doing that, especially if you've got no experience as a hardened criminal? Just setup a lunch date with a guy who's famous for breaking out of prison. It's just that simple.
Actually that scene, which features Liam Neeson gritting his teeth through tough man dialogue trying to teach John that maybe being a criminal isn't the soundest choice, is the highlight of the film. Neeson, a consummate pro, has never needed a lot of screen time to make an impression. He's only involved for about three minutes and I was desperately hoping the film would ditch everything and just follow his character around for awhile.
Unfortunately that doesn't happen, and we're back to John's meticulous planning. He takes photos, puts them on his big posterboard on the wall, takes more photos. You'll get used to the pattern pretty soon. Once in awhile he takes a break to commit acts that throw the entire balance of the film out of wack, such as killing a bunch of folks in an effort to secure enough money for his family to run away on. Hmmm...interesting moral compass you have there, sir.
All this in an effort to answer one single question: How far would you go to rescue a loved one? It's actually a very good question, and one that Paul Haggis isn't prepared to answer in any logical way. It's much easier for him to create an utterly ridiculous fairy tale, full of contrivances and complete deviations from reality. Nobody acts the way John would act. No plan such as his could possibly succeed, nor do we get any indication that he has the know-it-all to make it work even if it was plausible.
What works for a large portion of the film is the question of Lara's innocence. The evidence is pretty heavily stacked up against her, and there's even a scene where a lawyer friend instructs John to just "look at the evidence". Seems pretty cut and dried, and Lara even indicates that she's guilty at one point, but there are other reasons why she would make such a claim. John seems pretty fixed and locked on her being not guilty, and that works perfectly fine. It's not until Haggis, again making sure that his audience knows exactly what's going on at all times, beats us over the head and shoulders with the truth. Not only does he show us what really happened, he then tacks on a completely useless additional scene with a pair of cops, who again reiterate exactly what anybody with an IQ greater than their shoe size has already figured out.
Russell Crowe is the only thing keeping this from being a walk out worthy flick. He internalizes so brilliantly a desperate man, unsure as a single father and even moreso as a master criminal. He's helpless without his wife, or so he says. Seems pretty focused to me, even employing a sexy neighbor(Oliva Wilde) to unwittingly aid in his plan. Crowe is so good that he almost covers up Haggis's storytelling flaws. Almost, but not quite.
